Freelance Writer/Editor

Business

15 April 2019

I wrote an insider's guide to Denver's start-up scene for the March/April issue of Inc. See here for the online version.

Many are drawn to Denver--Inc.'s No. 8 Surge City--for its laid-back, weed-friendly culture, which certainly doesn't stop with its plethora of cannabis startups. Here's everything you need to know about the city's entrepreneurial scene, from which investors to meet with to where to do Bend and Blaze yoga.

Hot Deal Spots

Entrepreneurs and investors take meetings at Denver Central Market, a warehouse-turned-gourmet food hall in the heart of the River North (RiNo) district, which flaunts a creamery, a butcher, a bakery, a fish­monger, and a wood-fired pizzeria. "It's slammed," says Tom Higley of early-stage accelerator 10.10.10, "but you can always find a seat."

The Commons on Champa, formed by a public-private partnership four years ago, is a hub for early-stage startups that provides free co-working space, with the option to rent out conference rooms and event space.

Cultivated Synergy is where cannapreneurs congregate. This lively co-working space in the RiNo district has communal work­spaces, five private offices--occupants include a concentrates company and a payroll firm--and Bend and Blaze yoga. At night, it transforms into an event venue where even non­members can attend everything from beer tastings and bat mitzvahs to budtender-appreciation parties.

Neighborhoods

Tech execs and employees tend to work and live in bustling LoDo (Lower Downtown), given its proximity to co-working spaces CTRL Collective and two WeWorks, Facebook and Slack outposts, the commuter rail to the airport--and Kimbal Musk's restaurant, the Kitchen.

CBD (no, not that--the Central Business District) was once a neighborhood just for finance and energy stalwarts. Today, startups including Geospiza, Nanno, and Salt have colonized the area.

STATS

$27.02

Average cost per square foot of office space for the Denver metro area.

Source: The Downtown Denver Partnership

45

Number of co-working spaces in central Denver.

Source: The Downtown Denver Partnership

216

cannabis dispensaries and 272 indoor-grow locations reside in Denver.

Source: Excise and Licenses, City and County of Denver

Red Flags

The city has yet to see a unicorn. "We'll get seed and Series A funding, but then usually have to raise capital from the coasts," says Paul Foley, managing director at SmartCapital. When it comes to VC capital, Foley estimates that New York City gets 20 percent, Northern California gets 40 percent, and Denver gets a meager 0.6 percent. "So companies here exit earlier," he says. "You get faster, smaller exits."

The Players

Chris Onan, a co-founder of Galvanize, a Denver-based national coding school, is a strategy consultant-turned-venture capitalist who has invested in more than 200 companies. Onan can typically be found linking startups in the Denver-Boulder tech scene with talent or capital. "He's a super­connector," says Erik Mitisek, co-founder of Denver Startup Week. "He's our VC prince of the city."

Jenna Walker.CREDIT: Laura Murray

Jenna Walker was a professional photographer before co-founding online photo book Artifact Uprising. She sold her Denver-based company to VSCO in 2014, and recently became entrepreneur-in-residence of Techstars Sustainability in Partnership with the Nature Conservancy, which backs 10 entrepreneurs per year, like those behind Node, a Seattle-based company that makes eco prefab homes.

Erik Mitisek.CREDIT: Courtesy subject

Erik Mitisek, the chief innovation officer for Colorado governor John Hickenlooper and former CEO of the Colorado Technology Association, is indispensable when it comes to startups in this town. He co-founded Denver Startup Week, launched the Commons on Champa and the online booking agent Next Great Place, and is now president of financial software company IMAgine Analytics.

Brands to Watch

Jaclyn Fu and Lia Winograd launched Pepper, maker of bras for small-chested women, in 2017. "Most bra companies design for a single standard size: 36C," and then scale it up or down, says Fu. Pepper fixes the "cup gap."

If you're still searching for your ideal cannabis, order a genetic test from Green Genomix. The early-stage company, founded by Jackson Rowland, will send a DNA collection kit to analyze genetics like CB1 receptors, and then provide a report revealing which strain, consumption method, and ratio of CBD to THC is best for you.

Amy Baglan was on OkCupid and Match, but "it was such a sad experience," she says. An avid yogi with a regular meditation practice, in 2015 she launched MeetMindful, a dating app for the mindful-living crowd.

Founded by Bryan Leach in 2012, Ibotta makes a shopping app that allows people to earn cash back on everyday purchases. It's one of the largest consumer tech companies in Denver, with 500 employees.

CREDIT: Aaron Meshon

Talent Pipeline

University of Denver's Project X-ITE runs an entrepreneurship workshop series, an incubator, and an accelerator that has produced startups including Boobi Butter, which makes breast-care products and encourages women to get regular breast exams.

Accelerator and venture fund Canopy­Boulder has invested in a slew of cannabis-related companies, including digital signage outfit GreenScreens and Würk, a payroll company.

Early-stage accelerator 10.10.10 invites 10 successful serial entrepreneurs to Denver to solve one of 10 "wicked problems" in 10 days. Graduates include Spout, maker of a device that can be used with a smartphone to analyze the levels of lead and other contaminants in a drop of water.

Recent Big Exits

$2 billion SendGrid, to Twilio (2018)

$1.68 billion ViaWest, to Peak 10 (2017)

$230 million Craftsy, to NBC Universal (2017)

Recently Funded Startups

Welltok, a health care software company, raised $75 million in 2018, bringing its total funding to a reported $251.7 million.

CyberGRX, a cyber-risk platform company, raised $30 million in 2018.

Galvanize, one of the largest coding schools in the United States, raised $32 million in 2018­--bringing its total funding to more than $167 million--and then acquired San Francisco-based Hack Reactor.

26 November 2018

Turns out, there's lots of money to be made by servicing the companies that are growing and selling legal weed. I wrote this piece for the November issue of Inc.

Marijuana has had a shady past, but it's on the cusp of having a very conventional future. In 2017, U.S. consumers spent $8.5 billion on legal cannabis, a number projected to grow to $23.4 billion by 2022. With that growth has emerged an entire ecosystem of startups that support the less sexy side of cannabis. Not the luxury dispensaries or rose-hued vape-pen companies, but the infrastructure that keeps them going--from software systems to package-design firms. As legalization continues to spread--it's now permitted in 31 states, Washington, D.C., Guam, and Puerto Rico--so will the B2B industry solving cannabis's thorny challenges.

The Instagram Effect

Advertising regulations vary from state to state, but most national publications won't accept ads--and neither will Facebook. Instagram, however, generally does not flag cannabis content, so it has become a critical marketing tool.

Cannabis journalist Ricardo Baca has Grasslands, a well-respected cannabis PR firm in Denver. New York City-based North 6th Agency represents a handful of cannabis com­panies including BDS Ana­lytics and venture fund Canopy, both in Boulder, while San Diego-based CMW Media focuses on pharma­ceutical cannabis.

How High Will You Get?

In states where cannabis is legal, every bit has to be tested and labeled for levels of THC (tetra­hydrocannabinol, the substance that produces a high) and CBD (cannabidiol, which does not produce a high), along with, in many cases, pesticide residues, contaminants, and fungus. If a farm's crop doesn't make the grade, it's not allowed to sell it.

A handful of regulatory-driven testing labs have launched, including Cascadia Labs in Oregon, Pure Analytics in California, and Evio Labs, the largest publicly traded testing company, with nine sites.

The Future Is Female

Since female plants produce much higher levels of THC and CBD than males, growers always cull the males. Traditionally, cannabis growers "grow out" crops, which takes six to eight weeks, to determine the sex.

Portland, Oregon-based Phylos Bioscience, which is mapping the genome of cannabis online at the Galaxy, sells a DNA "sex test," which allows growers to quickly and accurately identify sex. "It saves a lot of money spent on feeding, watering, and lighting the males," says Phylos co-founder Mowgli Holmes, who has collected samples from 80 countries, making Phylos's database of cannabis genetics the largest in the world.

29 May 2018

Love the Wild's clever packaging. The delicious sauces are frozen in the shape of hearts.

I must admit: as an Oregonian who has subscribed to a wild salmon share for the last 3 years, I'm not a fan of the idea of farmed fish. I had this naive and outdated notion that all fish farms are crowded, dismal places, teeming with sea louse. In 2010, I had read in Paul Greenberg's book Four Fish, The Future of the Last Wild Food that farmed salmon had a terrible feed-to-conversion ratio: typically, farmed salmon need to eat six pounds of wild fish for every pound of flesh. But that has changed over the past eight years as some fish farms have found alternative feeds.

According to the Global Salmon Initiative, the average salmon farm today has a feed-conversion-ratio of 1.3:1. Kvarøy Fiskeoppdrett in Norway, which a sustainable seafood company called Love the Wild began sourcing from last year, is replacing fish meal with microbial proteins, algae-based oils, and grains, making their feed-conversion-ratio an impressive 0.47 to 1. I write about Love the Wild in the June issue of Inc. (pg. 48 if you have a subscription). Here's a PDF of my piece.

Meanwhile, I'm not quitting my Fish CSA, but I'm also going to be more open-minded about trying sustainably-raised farmed fish. Even Paul Greenberg agrees that we cannot live on wild fish stocks alone. Last year he was interviewed for NPR's the Salt about his Frontline documentary the Fish on my Plate and he said, "People often compare wild fish to farmed fish, but what we should really be doing is comparing fish to other forms of protein." Beef is way more resource-heavy than farmed fish. Love the Wild founder Jacqueline Claudia told me something similar.

"I’m not trying to win against wild fish. Truth be told: It’s some of my favorite fish. For me, it's farmed fish vs. farmed pork, farmed chicken, and farmed beef," she told me. "Great farmed fish is your daily driver—that’s what you eat during the week. On the weekend you get something wild and sustainable and you celebrate its terroir."

25 May 2018

I wrote about Ben Jacobsen and his Oregon-harvested artisanal sea salt for Inc.'s May issue.

Netarts Bay, a protected estuary on the Oregon Coast, is an ideal spot to harvest salt. [Photo: Carlos Chavarría]

While attending business school in Copenhagen in 2004, Ben Jacobsen fell in love with Maldon sea salt, the flaky finishing salt prized by chefs. Returning to the United States--landing in Portland, Oregon--he was shocked to find that no one here was harvesting anything like that high-end sea salt.

After his mobile-app-discovery startup went belly-up, Jacobsen began lugging 275-gallon wine totes of seawater from Netarts Bay back to his home in Portland, where he re-created the laborious (and messy) process of evaporating the water to make salt. "I destroyed cookware and pots and pans and made a mess in the oven and everything else," Jacobsen says. "It was definitely a learning experience." Today, his category-defining American flaky sea salt is the favored salt of celebrity chefs.

The process of salt-making is now much more efficient at Jacobsen's 6,000-square-foot production facility on the Oregon coast, where the company has built custom equipment. Jacobsen's 42-person crew harvests 18,000 pounds of salt per month, which is then sent to the warehouse in Portland's Central Eastside to be packaged and shipped out to Williams Sonoma, Whole Foods, and thousands of other retailers across the country. "Like the people who went to California 240 years ago and wondered if it was possible to grow grapes and make wine there," says Jacobsen, "we're the first in our category to make great salt in the U.S. mainstream."

08 May 2018

Every so often an assignment comes along that takes you out of your typical beat, making you so honored to be a journalist because it allows you to meet wise and captivating people and learn about their work and their passions. This was one of those moments. I got to profile Rukaiyah Adams for Bon Appetit's Healthyish series on "Superpowered Women"—women who are redefining wellness in their communities. As I spoke to Rukaiyah over lunch at her southwest Portland home, I realized that we have a lot in common: she's a runner, she invests in startups run by women and people of color (I don't do that, but I write about them), she loves Oregon wines (particularly Antica Terra) and she longs for our city to be a place where everyone is included in its successes. I learned a lot from interviewing her.

When Rukaiyah Adams left a New York City–based hedge fund in 2010, a non-compete clause forced her to take an extended break from work. Missing her mom, who had just been in a car accident, she flew to her hometown of Portland, Oregon.

“I went for a run in Forest Park. It was raining lightly, and the sound of rain tapping against the leaves, the smell of soil...” and that’s when it came to me: I am not a New Yorker.”

Nine months later, she packed her bags and moved to Portland, a decision that had major ripple effects. Not only did living in Portland reignite her relationship with David Chen, a lawyer in the Bay Area, it helped her switch gears professionally.

“I could make ten times more in New York, but I was past the mastery part,” Adams tells me, as she putters around the kitchen of her 1920s English-cottage-style home, making us lunch. “I needed to develop a point-of-view.” In Portland, she landed a job as director of investment management at the Standard, a financial services group, and, in 2013, was appointed to the board of the Oregon Investment Council, the state pension fund.

Today, Adams, 44, is the chief investment officer at Meyer Memorial Trust, the third largest foundation in Oregon, with assets of $788.5 million. Started by Oregon grocery store magnate Fred G. Meyer, the trust gives away roughly $35 million a year to Oregon-based social justice and advocacy organizations, equitable education and affordable housing initiatives, and environmental programs. These grants are only possible due to the success of the Meyer investment portfolio, which Adams manages.

“Rukaiyah is tackling big, thorny, important, often fraught issues,” says Eve Callahan, an executive vice president at Portland-based Umpqua Bank and long-time admirer. “And she’s doing it with such grace and generosity.”

But when I ask her what she does at Meyer, Adam’s reply is pithy: “My job is to make the money.”

Long runs in nature—she loves jogging along the Willamette River as well as in 5,200-acre Forest Park—help keep Adams poised in her high-pressure position. “Believe it or not, being healthy and having outlets is pretty important to the technical requirements of the job,” she says as we sit at her marble kitchen table, eating iceberg lettuce with goat cheese, sliced cucumbers and radishes, and shaved carrots, along with avocado smeared on toasted sourdough. “If the person managing money is pulling out her hair and crying, it generates a lot of stress!”

In high school, she played basketball and soccer, and, at Carleton College in Minnesota, she was passionate about rugby. Running has even spurred radical investment changes that have been good for the Meyer portfolio.

More recently, Adams has shifted Meyer’s strategy from a more traditional one of investing in global markets to mission-related regional investing.

“Historically, Meyer has focused on venture capital and accelerators—which has done quite well,” says Adams. “But, looking back over who has benefitted from that investing, it’s the same people who normally benefit.” Over the past year, Adams has stepped up investments in businesses run by women and people of color. In 2016, she invested $2 million in Nitin Rai’s Elevate Capital, a fund that invests in Pacific Northwest startups led by women and minorities. (Elevate was a seed investor in feminist tomboy clothing company Wildfang as well as in Hue Noir, a makeup company geared to people of color.)

But sexy startups only comprise a small part of Oregon’s economy. “The reality is that most brown people and people of color are employed by small businesses. And we need to grow those businesses,” Adams says. At the moment, Adams has her eye on a few businesses around the state. She’s particularly keen to invest in firms that bridge the urban-rural divide. “They don’t know it, but I’m watching them closely,” Adams says, conspiratorially. “I’m watching how they respond to stress. How they manage their time. How steady they are over time. When you invest in someone, it’s like getting married to them.”

On that subject, on New Year’s Eve, Adams wed Chen in an elegant ceremony at the Parker Palm Springs. Adams paused as she sliced vegetables for our salad to show me some photos: One of her and Chen all dressed up in their wedding best, looking radiant and joyous; one of Adams hugging her mom in front of a decorative concrete screen wall.

Several times during our interview, she tells me with pride what a fabulous cook Chen is. The youngest of three boys (by about a decade), he spent a lot of time at home with his mom, who taught him to be confident in a kitchen. He has a habit of leaving a cookbook lying on the kitchen counter—Andy Ricker’s Pok Pok, for instance, or Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty—with a note: “Pick a recipe.” Adams grabs the Pok-Pok cookbook and flips to Ricker’s recipe for Vietnamese turmeric-marinated catfish with noodles and herbs, and I glimpse a note she scrawled beneath it commemorating that he made it for her on Valentine’s Day last year. Adams says their division of labor is simple: she takes care of the baking and roasting, and he does all the cooking. (She happily does the dishes.)

Adams also loves Oregon wines, particularly winemaker Maggie Harrison’s Antica Terra. (“All I do is hug the bottles when I get them,” Adams says.) But her weekday routine does not allow for leisurely meals—at least until dinner. Like many other West Coast investors, she’s up by 6:00 a.m. to check the markets. “So even if I’m not at work, I’m working.” If she runs in the morning before work, she’ll grab a yogurt or piece of fruit on her way out the door. “I love those shredded wheat things that have sugar on top, which I probably shouldn’t eat, but they’re delicious,” she says. Once at the Meyer Memorial Trust office in the Pearl District, she’s at her desk for a few hours, and then around 11:00 a.m. she goes for a 20-minute walk. “I usually have to miss lunch, then I have to gobble it standing up at the sink,” she says. In an effort to eat more mindfully, she’s started bringing leftovers. By around 3:00 p.m., she’s ready for a cup of coffee and a walk—without her phone. “I like to smell the city and see people,” says Adams.

Lately, though, she’s working on cutting back. “2018 is going to be the year of no. I have two talks to give this year, and that’s it,” Adams tells me, with what sounds like resolution. But you get a sense that this woman would never be satisfied sitting on the sidelines.

When Adams moved back to Portland in 2011, she found a city in flux. Always a majority-white city, Portland was gentrifying at a rapid clip, with black and brown families being pushed out to the suburbs. A fourth generation Portlander—her great grandmother moved to Portland from Louisiana in the late 1950s—she had already witnessed gentrification first hand. Walnut Park, the neighborhood she grew up in, is now known as the Alberta Arts district.

As we eat, she tells me the devastating history of Lower Albina, better known today as the Rose Quarter. A vibrant African American and immigrant neighborhood full of bungalows, jazz clubs, corner groceries, and churches, it was affordable and easily walkable to downtown and the neighborhood known as the garment district (now the Pearl). In the late 1950s, the city declared the area blighted and leveled it, making way for the Interstate, Memorial Coliseum, and a hospital that never materialized. Residents, including Adams’ great grandmother and the German family she rented a room from, were forced to move out. It was an act of racial injustice that many Portlanders are still smarting from.

Adams is now on the board of Albina Vision, a coalition of community leaders and developers that aims to redevelop the Rose Quarter with affordability, equity, and walkability in mind. If Adams and the rest of the Albina Vision board get their way, the Rose Quarter will have a public connection to the Willamette River (right now, the lovely bike-and-pedestrian Eastbank Esplanade ends abruptly at the Steel Bridge), a walkable street grid from the 1950s, and affordable housing as a form of reparations to the families who were displaced.

Adams pauses and her voice drops to a whisper, so that I need to lean in to hear her. “My grandmother wrote in her Bible, ‘Dear God, I hope I’ve made the right decision in bringing my family to this place. And someday, I hope that one of my children has love, meaningful work, and safety.’” says Adams. “And I am that child.”

25 April 2018

Wine clubs are nothing new. They’ve been around since at least 1972, when the the Wine of the Month Club was founded. Even publications like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and The Nation have wine clubs. But over the years, this sector of the wine industry has stagnated, according to Paul Mabray, a veteran of the successful wine tech startups Wine Direct and VinTank.

Until recently, that is.

A flurry of hyperfocused online wine clubs have launched over the past few years and appear to be thriving. There’s a wine club for organic and biodynamic wine. There’s one that focuses exclusively on Oregon producers and one that ships only Champagne; there’s even a club that singles out wines from women-owned wineries in Sonoma County. These subscription wine clubs are startups that are either self-financed or financed by investors (that is, they’re not financed by wineries).

“The subscription economy is in full force,” says Mabray, who is known in the wine industry as “the dean of digital.” “It’s a whole new rebirth of this thing that wineries have been doing for the longest time.” Though there are no statistics for subscription wine services (aka online wine clubs), Mabray, who is on the board of the startup Clubzz, a wine subscription management tool, says this sector is growing “very strongly.”

The rebirth of online wine clubs echoes the popularity of subscription services in general. Consumers are now buying personalized wardrobes on Stitch Fix, new razor blades on Harry’s Razors, and gourmet dinner ingredients on Blue Apron. Even Amazon has gotten in on the action with Subscribe & Save—customers get 15 percent off when they order the same staples on a regular basis. Consumers love the convenience, personalized service, and (in some cases) discounts. “And for companies,” says Mabray, “subscription services create a predictable revenue stream.” A recent survey by McKinsey & Company shows that the subscription economy has grown by more than 100 percent a year over the past five years, with the largest retailers generating more than $2.6 billion in subscription sales in 2016 (up from $57 million in 2011).

Etty Lewensztain launched Plonk Wine Merchants in 2010 as a highly selective online wine shop. “It was a digital version of that cool wine boutique in your neighborhood,” says Lewensztain. “I was getting rid of the wines that are a waste of time.”

But the unique wineries and offbeat grapes she featured on the site were so little known that customers were stumped. “They didn’t know the brand or recognize the varietal,” Lewensztain says. “So we decided to choose wine for people.” Sales with the wine club quickly outpaced à la carte purchases, and in 2013, Lewensztain rebranded Plonk as a wine club. (Though she’s added a wine store back onto the Plonk site, it’s mainly where current subscribers go to reorder wines they’ve loved from their shipments.)

Today Plonk Wine Merchants features wines that have been made with organic and biodynamic grapes—though Lewensztain stresses that she’s not dogmatic. “Some are certified; some are not,” she says. “We’re not religious about every single wine needing to be Demeter-certified.”

The same goes for natural wines. Though she’s generally a fan herself, she’s wary of selling the “interesting” but not mass-consumer-friendly type of natural wines. “You know—the kind that have particulate matter floating around in them,” she says. “I think those wines are better suited for an on-premise atmosphere where you can have a sommelier explain the wine to you—and take it back if you don’t like it.” But her litmus test is that the wines be made well and sustainably, with no sprays in the vineyard. “Authentic wines that are not made in a boardroom and tinkered with with Mega Purple and so on,” Lewensztain says. “We’re really not into that style of wine.”

Some recent popular bottles include the Balla Geza Fetească Neagră from Romania and a Pojer e Sandri Nosiola from Italy’s Trentino region. Plonk’s monthly shipments of 4 or 12 bottles include shipping costs. The 4-bottle shipment is $110, and 12-bottle is $285, making it the better deal, at $23.75 a bottle. Plonk features wines only from existing wineries (there are no private-label wines). Though Lewensztain would not disclose how many members Plonk has, she said the business has grown “quite a significant amount” over the past five years. Like other online wine clubs included in this article, Plonk does not accept marketing dollars from wineries. “We are self-funded,” says Lewensztain, “and we definitely don’t take any sort of payment.”

Plonk Wine Merchants provided inspiration for Carrie Wynkoop, a political strategist based in Portland, Oregon, who founded the wine club Cellar 503 three years ago. Says Wynkoop, “Lewensztain does a good job of explaining wines in a non-snobby way.”

But Wynkoop created Cellar 503 mostly because it was something she craved. “I have a big passion for Oregon and for Oregon wine,” she says. “I was sitting on the beach with my husband, and I was like, ‘I just want someone to send me Oregon wine to my doorstep.’ He said, ‘There you go: That’s your idea.’” Six months later, she had launched Cellar 503, focusing on small-batch winemakers (fewer than than 10,000 cases a year) and bottles under $30. The club, which Wynkoop and her husband funded through their own savings, is breaking even right now, with roughly 300 club members, but Wynkoop says they’re on track to make a profit in 2018. Though 40 percent of Cellar 503’s members are from Oregon, the remaining 60 percent hail from 28 other states—an indication of Oregon wine’s prominence on the national stage.

Wynkoop loves ferreting out small producers that the wine-drinking public would otherwise not know about, saying, “I like to call myself a little PR agency for the small guys.”

Each month, to keep things fun, Wynkoop sets a theme. January was “Italy in Oregon,” so she featured wines like a 2014 Primitivo from Cana’s Feast and a 2016 Vermentino from Troon Vineyard. February—“We Love Southern Oregon!”—included bottles from little-known wineries like Simple Machine in Talent (near Ashland) and Nicole Reese in Medford. In May, to celebrate Mother’s Day, Wynkoop features women winemakers. Members can choose to receive shipments of two or four bottles, either monthly or quarterly.

After experimenting with prices, Wynkoop now has a flat pricing structure. “One of the things members said was irritating was that [the price] was different every month,” Wynkoop says. So now, two bottles of white are always $45, and two bottles of red are always $55; mixed is $50. (Shipping is an additional $19.99, though club members in the Portland area can pick up their wines at a monthly free tasting at the Cellar 503 tasting room.) Because Wynkoop wants to feature wines that are approachable and affordable, bottle prices never exceed $30. “I want folks to feel comfortable opening them on a Wednesday night,” she says, “[and] not feel they need to save them for a special occasion.”

But there is a wine club at the “special occasion” end of the spectrum too. SommSelect, founded by Master Sommelier Ian Cauble in 2014, focuses on premium wines—the kind of high-quality bottles you’d find at Michelin-starred restaurants. “There are a lot of people in this space who are discounting,” Cauble says. “[But] nothing incredible is ever 80 percent off.”

That said, for premium wines, SommSelect’s half-case prices are hard to beat. The club offers a monthly “educational blind-tasting kit” of six wines (three red, three white) for $199, or Somm Six, also $199, a monthly shipment of six of Cauble’s favorite wines (a mix of reds, whites, and rosés). Shipping is included.

But most of the company’s business comes from à la carte ordering. Every day, SommSelect sends out one to two detailed emails telling the story of a wine—profiling its winemaker, the estate’s history, and its appellation. David Lynch, the James Beard Award–winning wine writer and former wine director at Babbo, Quince, and more recently, St. Vincent, was hired as SommSelect’s editorial director last year, and he and other writers help Cauble compose the lively, absorbing profiles. (Cauble’s deep tasting notes are included, as are food-pairing recommendations.) Customers can either snap up the featured bottle on the spot or build a custom order for later shipment. (Members get free shipping if they buy roughly $100 worth of wine.) The custom order ships after 60 days or once it has reached a 12-bottle case—whichever comes first.

“We’re offering wines that people are fighting to get a taste of,” says Cauble, noting that when allocations are small, the emails go out only to the company’s top 500 customers. Some examples of upcoming wines that will be offered to all email subscribers are Nicolas Joly’s Clos de la Bergeries Savennières 2014, for $55, and a 1990 Frog’s Leap Merlot, for $150.

Cauble would not divulge the number of club members SommSelect has on a monthly basis, but 20,000 people have signed up to receive the free daily emails. He says business has been growing by 20 to 30 percent per year since 2014. “We are making money,” Cauble says, “but everything is going back into the company.” SommSelect has new offices in Sonoma, California, and is expanding its warehouse as well.

Last fall, after the wildfires in Northern California, the writer and brand strategist Amy Bess Cook posted a list of women-owned wineries in Sonoma County. “I wanted to bring attention to female wine entrepreneurs,” she says. “There are plenty of women in the wine business, but we’re not in departments of upper management.” Cook’s intent was to create awareness so that consumers could funnel their dollars to these women-owned businesses. After getting positive feedback on the site, Cook, who had operated a wine club at Tin Barn Vineyards, decided to start Women-Owned Wineries, a club dedicated to these wines. It launched a few weeks ago, financed so far through a crowdfunding campaign. The club’s current focus is on the 51 wineries on the WOW Sonoma site initially, but Cook says that it will eventually grow to include all women-owned wineries in the U.S. Bottles will start shipping in May.

Niche wine clubs like these illustrate the continuing fragmentation of the wine market, says industry analyst Rob McMillan, the founder of Silicon Valley Bank’s Wine Division and the author of the annual State of the Wine Industry report. But they may prove to be exactly what the discerning consumer desires. “The need is there to get these small wines to consumers,” McMillan says. “The wine lovers that are out there want these. If you can be a trusted curator, that has value to consumers.”

21 March 2018

The news anchor encourages women in the wine and spirits industry to speak up and demand action

When Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson came forward in 2016 with sexual harassment allegations against Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes, there was no MeToo hashtag or Time’s Up movement. “It was an excruciating decision,” says Carlson. “I felt like I had jumped off a cliff by myself.” In an inspiring keynote address at the Women of the Vine and Spirits Global Symposium Napa, California, this week, Carlson encouraged women to have the courage to speak up about sexual harassment and sexual assault in their workplaces.

Speaking Out

Like many women, Carlson has endured sexual harassment and assault throughout her career. She was harassed by a stalker for four years early in her television days. Screenwriter William Goldman wrote a book in which he referred to her as Miss Piggy for being overweight when she was Miss America in 1989 (she was, in fact, 110 pounds). She was also sexually assaulted twice, in her 20s, while starting out in the television industry. The first time, she had cold-called a high-level TV executive. He spent the day showing her around the offices, making calls on her behalf, and then took her out for dinner. In the backseat of a cab, though, he attacked her. “All of a sudden he lunged [at] me and was on top of me and his tongue was down my throat. I screamed for the driver to stop and let me out of the car,” says Carlson. “At the old age of 22, I didn’t realize that breaking into the television business also meant letting him break into my pants.”

The second time, she was in Los Angeles, meeting with an agent. “Again, we were in a car—he grabbed my neck and he forced my head so hard into his crotch I couldn’t breathe,” says Carlson, adding that she managed to escape.

“Only recently did I realize that these cases weren’t actually harassment—they were assault,” says Carlson. “But like so many female survivors, I thought, ‘I’ve got this. I’m okay. Just move on, Gretchen.’ I bought into the myth that somehow I’d asked for it, and thought I wouldn’t be believed if I told people anyway.” It took Carlson 25 years to call these two instances assault out loud.

So while she encourages women to speak up about sexual harassment and assault—and also urges men to speak out when they see it happening in the workplace—she realizes how tough it can be. When Carlson’s complaints went public in 2016, she was most concerned about the impact her case would have on her children, who were 11 and 12 at the time. “They were of paramount concern to me,” she says. “My face was constantly on the news, and they were going to school.” But ultimately, she says, she underestimated her kids. Her daughter came home from school bewildered by all the gossip but said, “Mom, I felt so proud to tell them that you are my mom!” And when her daughter finally stood up to two kids at school who had been taunting her, she told Carlson, “Mommy, I found the bravery and the courage to do it because I saw you do it.”

19 September 2017

When Cattail Creek Lamb owner John Neumeister was younger, he would devote one day per week to making the 110-mile drive from his ranch near Junction City, Oregon to Portland, where the bulk of his customers were located.

“I’d leave the farm, drive 100 miles to the processor, pack the order myself, do the invoices by hand in the truck, and then go make 20-25 deliveries at restaurants around Portland,” said Neumeister, who will turn 70 next month. He would crash at a friend’s house in Portland, then do more deliveries the next day, on the way back home.

These 15-hour-days took their toll, but they also didn’t allow Neumeister, who has been raising pastured lamb since he took over his family’s flock in high school, any time to drum up new business or work on long-term sales strategy. And if he got a last-minute order from a Portland restaurant who suddenly ran out of lamb mid-week there was little he could do about it.

“If a chef called me on Thursday, I might say ‘You know, I can see if UPS can deliver it,’” Neumeister said. Which meant trying—sometimes in vain—to stalk his local UPS driver, whose delivery route he knew by heart. If he couldn’t locate the UPS truck, Neumeister was out of luck.

“And then the restaurant would end up buying from one of my competitors.”

A B-Line trike rider leaves the Redd with a refrigerated box full of food for Portland area restaurants

Now, thanks to the Redd on Salmon, a Portland food hub created by the environmental nonprofit Ecotrust, Neumeister not only has freezer storage space for up to 3,600 pounds of lamb in Central Eastside Portland, he’s got a stall for staging orders, an office space, and built-in distribution via B-Line trikes to Portland area restaurants.

Best of all, there’s no need to chase down UPS drivers. When a restaurant needs a special order of pastured lamb, as happened earlier this month with chef Joshua McFadden’s Tusk, all Neumeister needs to do is call B-line, who also does fulfillment for Cattail Creek.

12 September 2017

When consumers hear the term private-label wines, they may envision Trader Joe’s Two-Buck Chuck or Costco’s Kirkland Signature brand, which includes Chiantis and Malbecs that retail for $6. But what they may not realize is that the private-label market has grown beyond the bottom shelf. Premium private-label wines are popping up at Costco and even Whole Foods for as much as $24.

Private-label wines—traditionally, brands created for a company (often a retailer or restaurant), which sell exclusively via one sales channel—are no longer, by definition, plonk. (Though plenty of volume-driven, inexpensive wine still exists.) These days, restaurants from Shake Shack to The French Laundry, as well as brands like Whole Foods and Grand Hyatt hotels, are getting into the private-label game, partnering with respected wineries like Frog’s Leap (in the case of Shake Shack) and Michael Mondavi’s Folio Fine Wine Partners (for Grand Hyatt’s Canvas line) to make wines that are exclusively available to their customers. Some of these wines are easily identifiable “linked” brands, such as Costco’s Kirkland, Sam’s Club’s Member’s Mark, and Trader Joe’s eponymous label. Others are less obviously aligned with their owners, including Whole Foods’ Wine Farmer or Kroger’s Acronym, which many consumers may not realize are private-label brands. What all private-label wines chiefly have in common is that the retailer, hotel chain, or restaurant often has a hand in forming the flavor profile and style of the wine and that the resulting wines are priced lower than similar wines from recognized wineries.

The profile of these wines has risen to such a degree that the Wall Street Journal’s wine columnist, Lettie Teague, recently devoted a column to the category. She singled out three Costco wines, including the 2015 Rutherford Napa Valley Meritage ($14), which she called a remarkable value. She also liked the 2016 Member’s Mark Mosel Riesling ($10.50) at Sam’s Club.

“Everybody has the same goal: to buy good wine for cheap,” says Andrew Cullen, founder of the CostcoWineBlog.com, which publishes independent reviews of the retailer’s private-label wines.

31 July 2017

When Agnes Nyinawumuntu began her career as a coffee farmer two decades ago, she picked coffee “cherries" indiscriminately and with little care for quality. Back then, because she was selling her cherries to a middleman for a pittance — 250 Rwandan francs (about 30 U.S. cents) for 2 pounds of unwashed cherries — she had no incentive to select only the ripe, scarlet-colored cherries that create the best coffee.

Today, after three years of training in agronomy, cupping and roasting by the nonprofit Relationship Coffee Institute, Nyinawumuntu is paid nearly $2 a pound for her beans, and she is also the past president of the Twongere Umusaruro Cooperative in eastern Rwanda. She has become a respected figure in Rwanda’s coffee industry who is regularly asked to train other Rwandan coffee-growers in best agricultural practices. The money she has earned has lifted her family out of poverty — she was able to upgrade their earthen dwelling to a stucco house and purchase mattresses for herself and her husband and for each of their five children, as well as purchasing livestock and an additional plot of land for farming.

Over the last four years, the Relationship Coffee Institute has enrolled more than 14,000 female coffee farmers in Rwanda in its training, teaching them how to improve coffee quality throughout the growing and processing of the beans. The Relationship Coffee Institute (RCI) is a unique collaboration between a B Corp-certified coffee importer, Sustainable Harvest, and the nonprofit Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Improving economic opportunities for farmers like Nyinawumuntu is RCI’s reason for existing.

14 June 2017

In late February, I read an Op-Ed by Nicholas Kristof called "Trump Voters are Not the Enemy" that really resonated for me. Like everyone I know, I'd been struggling to understand how 62 million Americans could vote for someone who treats women so abysmally, stoops to racial slurs, and ridicules everyone from disabled people to Miss Universe. I realized there were other reasons Trump appealed to folks, of course, but I assumed that voting for him meant you also endorsed his worse traits.

Todd Nash, in a photo taken by Brown Cannon III for 1859 Magazine

Since agriculture is one of my beats, I went in search of farmers from my (and Kristof's) home state of Oregon. What I discovered is that Trump supporters have complicated feelings about him—even more so now that the new budget proposal makes such drastic cuts to the agriculture programs that really help farmers (some of the very people who helped elect him). But these farmers still hope he will deliver when it comes to getting rid of regulations. I think my favorite quote came from rancher Todd Nash, the Commissioner of Wallowa County out in Eastern Oregon, when I asked him if he had any reservations about Trump.

“His personality! His flippant comments! It was really tough for me to vote for somebody that was not respectful in a lot of ways,” said Nash. “During the campaign, every time he would say something that was so offensive, I kept saying, ‘Doggone it! Don’t make it so hard for me to vote for you!’” he recalled.

Read the whole four-part series, which was published in Oregon Business Magazine earlier this week.

31 January 2017

Is natural wine a fad or the next big thing in sustainable viticulture? I wrote about Oregon's place in the natural wine movement for the January issue of Oregon Business Magazine.

Three natural winemakers at a recent dinner at Dame, Dana Frank's wine bar

It wasn’t long ago that you’d find me perusing the wine aisles at Trader Joe’s, searching for a bottle of affordable Pinot Noir for book club. A conscientious consumer, I’d choose a bottle from Oregon or Washington even if I couldn’t find organic or biodynamic. Little did I realize that even these wines—usually hovering at $12 a bottle—contain all sorts of chemicals and additives that, while not imminently dangerous, I’d certainly refuse to ingest if they were listed on a loaf of bread or a box of Grape Nuts. But because the FDA doesn’t regulate wines (that job falls to the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau), there are no labeling requirements for what goes into each bottle.

If there were, you would be shocked. In addition to the pesticides and herbicides that many conventional wineries use in the fields, winemakers routinely use chemicals and additives in the cellar.

Some of the more egregious include Velcorin (dimethyl dicarbonate, which essentially sterilizes the wine and requires wearing a hazmat suit to dispense it); a plastic polymer known as PVPP (used as a fining agent to remove astringency); and something called Mega Purple, a grape concentrate that is used to “plump up” the color of a pale red wine and add a jammy flavor.

Though USDA organic standards forbid the use of most of these additives, they allow less benign substances like enzymes, powdered tannins, oak chips, dry powdered fish bladder (Isinglass) and egg whites.

As the market for organic food has soared over the past decade, a parallel movement has been quietly humming along in the wine world. It turns out that many mass-produced wines have been tinkered with endlessly in the cellar; they might contain anything from designer yeast strains and bentonite clay to the chemicals listed above.

So, mirroring the organic-food movement, a scrappy and somewhat rebellious movement has sprung up that champions so-called natural wines. The phrase, and the practice, is controversial, because there’s no agreed-upon definition of natural wine, and neither is there a third-party certifier.

13 October 2016

It’s a Wednesday night in July at Ava Gene’s on Southeast Division Street in Portland, and the dining room is pulsing with energy. Couples sit at tables for two, while groups of friends speak volubly over bottles of Barbaresco and plates of bruschetta. Not a seat remains empty in the 70-seat dining room — just a few spots at the chef’s counter.

The same is true of Nostrana, Cathy Whims' 10-year-old Italian restaurant, on any weekday at lunch. And just witness the crowd lining up to eat at Ox, Greg and Gabrielle Quinoñez Denton's hugely popular Argentinian restaurant in Northeast Portland. (Or SuperBite, their buzzy new small plates-focused-restaurant downtown.)

As everybody knows, Portland has an incredibly vibrant culinary scene with an abundance of chef talent and locally sourced ingredients. But sometimes I wonder: Who are all these people who dine out night after night? And in a town renowned for its farmers market, isn’t anyone cooking at home anymore?

18 August 2016

I've been wanting to write about Ecotrust's the Redd on Salmon ever since VP of Food and Farming Amanda Oborne explained the concept to me. I finally got my wish: my short article on the Redd appears in the September issue of Fast Company magazine.

Here's a longer version of the story:

The local food movement has reached a plateau. According to the latest census, Americans spend a mere $1.3 billion on local food via farmers markets and CSAs. (That’s a fraction the trillions we spend in the industrial food system). Though many midsized farmers and ranchers long to expand their reach, most don’t have the infrastructure, time, or staff to do so.

Environmental think tank Ecotrust in Portland, Oregon, may have the answer. After years of research on what the so-called “agriculture of the middle” needs to scale up, Ecotrust’s in-house food systems expert Amanda Oborne has helped spawn a new project. Called the Redd on Salmon Street, the two-building $23 million campus is part high-end food hall, part “food hub”—a central warehouse where farmers, ranchers, and other food producers can stash their product until it’s ready to be distributed. And because this is Portland, the food is not distributed via CO2-spewing trucks. Instead, a company called B-line employs cyclists to deliver product via a fleet of electric-assist trikes with refrigerated trailers that carry up to 700 pounds. The Redd (the term for the spawning ground of salmon) is poised to grow Oregon’s regional food economy from boutique to badass.

Food hubs are nothing new. In fact, there are roughly 350 food hubs across the U.S., according to the Wallace Center’s National Good Food Network. But the Redd is unique.

Most food hubs are run like nonprofits. The Redd is a for-profit business with equity investors. It has anchor tenants like the FoodCorps national headquarters, retail space (ground will break on the Redd “east” building in the fall), and production kitchens for value-added food businesses. These businesses, which pay market-rate rents, subsidize the less sexy behind-the-scenes storage and operations, which is run by B-line. Think of it as a mash-up of a real estate development, food hall, and traditional food hub.

At press time, B-line had already signed on 30 clients including Betsy’s Best Bars (vegan energy bars), Camas Country Mill (flour), Carman Ranch (grass-fed beef), OlyKraut (gourmet sauerkraut), Organically Grown Co. (produce), and Starvation Alley Farms (organic cranberries and juice). Here’s how it works: a company delivers its product to the Redd and stores it either in dry or cold storage. B-line riders repack products into a trailer and bike it around town from AirBnB’s corporate cafeteria to local grocery stores like New Seasons, and on to downtown restaurants like Higgins and Cafe Bijou. (The trikes have a 2.5 mile delivery radius.)

It’s hard to overstate how excited ranchers and fisherman are about the Redd’s 2,000 square feet of cold storage—half freezer space, half refrigeration. Oborne calls it “the beating heart of the entire campus.”

“It used to be that all the little guys would pull up at New Seasons in their Subarus or pick-ups, clogging up the dock doors,” says Oborne. “Now they bring their stuff to the Redd and it gets repacked for store-specific delivery.” Vendors love this because they don’t waste time making deliveries; New Seasons loves it because trikes can bike right into the packing area.

There’s nothing wrong with shopping at farmers markets, of course, but Oborne sees them as a point on the local food economy’s trajectory. “Farmers markets helped us wake up,” Oborne says. “Projects like the Redd will help us grow up.”

22 March 2016

It was fun writing about Bamboo Sushi's new downtown location for Oregon Business Magazine's Power Lunch column. I felt a little strange eavesdropping on fellow diners, but—for better or worse—I got good at doing that during the 13 years I lived in New York City...

Atmosphere: The high-ceilinged space, revamped by local architecture firm Design Department, has white oak tables, floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors and Japanese baskets adorning one wall. The overall effect is Japanese farmhouse chic.

Clientele: Executives in tailored suits, women in sheer silk blouses and gold jewelry, and couples clad in the typical Portland uniform of jeans and Nau. At the adjacent table, an executive from the Mark Spencer Hotel was meeting with a staffer from Fat Head’s Brewery.

Most popular: The kalbi (Piedmontese grilled short ribs); karaage (fried chicken thigh in a gluten-free batter, served with a dill-yuzu kewpie); and the pork belly and kimchee. The daily nigiri and signature rolls are always a hit.

Best seat in the house: For the utmost privacy, ask for one of the tables in the alcove near the bar. But most guests opt for a table adjacent to the sliding windows on 12th, or, when the weather is nice, an outdoor table on the sidewalk patio.

Inside dope: This space, on the corner of Stark and 12th, was formerly a methadone clinic.

Bragging rights: The restaurant will soon have a rooftop garden that seats an additional 30 people.

Overheard: “I lived in Japan for two years, so I’m an expert in chopsticks,” said a dapper man to his lunch date. When that table turned, a man and his female friend met for lunch. The man had just returned from a trip to New York City. “So my friend Shannon, the drummer, was doing a week’s stint on this celebrity show,” he says. “I stayed at the Jane. I saw some really inspiring art. It was a sign of optimism, I thought.”

Lofty goals: “We don’t do part-time employees,” Lofgren says. “We’re trying to build a strong full-time workforce: people who will get paid leave, maternity leave, health benefits. People want to have families. They want to have a life. We want to be part of enhancing their lives, and they’ll feel that good juju and enhance our lives in return.”

16 February 2016

My story on Portland's cricket craze was published two weeks ago on Oregon Business Magazine and will be in the March issue of the paper magazine.

Cricket brownies were just one of the many foods on offer at Portland's recent Cricket Cook-off

On a chilly December evening, a hundred daring eaters and enterprising home cooks packed into the WeWork event space to taste delicacies such as Brown Butter Jiminies and Hopped-up Miang Kham, a spicy Thai leaf wrap topped with fried crickets. Portland’s first ever cricket cook-off, organized by food meet-up group Food Bytes, not only sold out — it quickly ran out of the tastiest dishes.

Portland, as it happens, is going through a cricket craze. While San Francisco has just one cricket flour company, Portland boasts three: Cricket Flours, Poda Foods, and Thinksect.

“Crickets are twenty times more efficient than beef at creating protein,” says Charles Wilson, founder and CEO of Cricket Flours, one of the three start-ups that donated flour and whole crickets for the cook-off. The startup founders were also present to proclaim crickets’ health benefits and their potential as a sustainable food source.

Crickets, Wilson notes, are not only high in protein, iron, calcium, and magnesium, they also contain B12 and Omega-3s. It goes without saying that they are also gluten-free — a distinct advantage when one-third of Americans are trying to cut gluten from their diets. In addition to cricket baking flour, Cricket Flours sells instant oatmeal and ready-to-go protein shakes in three flavors, including peanut butter chocolate.

“In the future, Portland will have insect food carts,” says Ebin Barnett, one of the founders of Thinksect, which imports cricket flour from Thailand. But first we have to get over the “ick factor.” Barnett showed a slide of a California roll and reminded his audience that Americans were grossed out by sushi when it first appeared on menus in the 1970s.

“Now eating raw fish is normal. Will insects be the new normal?” asked Barnett.

Yesenia Gallardo and Kenny Cloft, co-owners of Oregon’s first cricket farm, Poda Foods, think it’s just a matter of time before restaurants like Pok-Pok put crickets on the menu. Indeed, chefs at ethnic restaurants across the country — from Brooklyn to Ballard — are already popularizing insects by serving them atop tacos, in soup and even in sushi.

“There are so many benefits to eating crickets,” says Gallardo, whose mother is from Oaxaca, Mexico, where chapulines (grasshoppers) are a delicacy. She believes crickets-as-food will become more mainstream as people realize the bugs’ health benefits.

Gallardo (CEO) and Cloft (COO) are farming crickets in a heated warehouse in Molalla. Crickets need heat and humidity to thrive— 80 degrees is ideal. The duo met at Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, where they proposed a cricket salad topping in an entrepreneurial business class. But as they researched the emerging edible insect market, they realized that despite an increased interest in cricket products, there was a striking lack of raw material in North America.

Poda Foods — the name is a play on the phylum Arthropoda — was born. Winning the $25,000 Sabin Sustainable Venture Prize at Yale helped finance start-up costs. But Cloft and Gallardo have not sought a first round of equity investment because they first want to prove to would-be investors that there’s demand for edible crickets. “We’re boot-strapping our way to building up the cricket production in the states,” says Cloft.

Cricket powder is still expensive, averaging between $30-$40 a pound, wholesale. Poda Foods, which will eventually produce cricket flour, too, hopes to bring the price down to $25 a pound.

They already have their first customer: Portland "paleo" bar company Grok. Thinksect, because it sources from practiced cricket farmers in Thailand, can get the wholesale price down to $20 a pound, but that’s only for a bulk order of 300-500 pounds.

Thinksect supplies a handful of “entomophagy start-ups” around the country, including San Francisco-based Chirps — “Eat What Bugs You!” — a cricket snack food company founded by three Harvard grads. Demand is still fairly small overall, though; a good month sees Thinksect moving 200 pounds of flour.

At least two billion people world-wide regularly eat insects, according to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. The practice is particularly common in Asia and Africa but also in Australia, Central America, and South America. But the trend has only recently started in the U.S.

In addition to Chirps, which makes cricket flour tortilla chips, two U.S. cricket energy bar companies have gotten serious investment: Chapul scored $50,000 from Mark Cuban of Shark Tank, and Exo had an impressive first seed round of $1.2 million. Tyler Florence’s Florence Group holds equity in Bitty Foods in San Francisco.

hamachi crudo in a squid ink and cricket cornet, topped with cricket "chicharrones"—yum!

Back at the Cook-off, Portlanders who lingered into the evening were rewarded with cricket creations by professional chefs: hamachi crudo in a squid ink and cricket cornet, topped with cricket chicharrones made by chef Todd Radcliffe from Chicken & Guns and cricket churros made by Isabel Sánchez from Churros Locos.

“I think we’ve greatly underestimated the palate of Americans,” says Cloft. “There are a lot of people who are ready to make the whole cricket jump. Seeing chefs doing it in places like New York City and Portland, will start to open that door even more for us. The sky’s the limit at that point.”

21 January 2016

I wrote about dulse, a crimson sea vegetable that's got the umami of bacon and the nutritional punch of kale, for the February issue of Fast Company. No, dulse is not new. It's been a culinary staple in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and New Brunswick for centuries. But this particular strain, which is being grown in tanks on the Oregon Coast, grows super fast.

Will farmed dulse be a sustainable new crop for Oregon? After tasting it at Imperial, I sure hope so.

01 June 2015

Oregon's famously strict land-use laws are what make our state so desirable. But with a new flurry of farm stays, European-style hiking trips, and forest resorts, a movement is afoot to relax these laws. Hannah Wallace investigates how this could be a boon not only for eco-tourism operators, but for the environment as well

Green Springs Inn & Cabins, 18 miles southeast of Ashland, is a singular place. A portion of the 150-acre property—which includes an eight-room main lodge and nine rustic cabins — lies inside the sprawling Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument. All nine solar-powered cabins are made from felled trees that were on the land when owner Diarmuid McGuire bought 145 acres from Boise Cascade in 2003. The property attracts all sorts— eco-travelers from Europe, Microsoft and Facebook employees, and Pacific Crest Trail hikers looking for their next meal. “People who want to be in the forest but not feel like they’re damaging it,” says owner Diarmuid McGuire.

The property is appealing precisely because of its setting on the edge of a vast wilderness; the 87,000-acre Cascade-Siskiyou forest has one of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the Cascade Range, with rare alpine meadows, 120 butterfly species, 200 bird species, and several dozen endangered animal species including the willow flycatcher and the northern spotted owl. In fact, Green Springs Inn is located on “resource land”— in this case, forestland that is protected from development under Oregon’s pioneering land- use laws. (McGuire was allowed to build nine cabins on this land due to a provision in the law that allows seasonal hunting and fishing cabins.)

“We’re in one of the last great boreal forests on the planet!” McGuire says, his voice swelling with pride. “The forest has been abused by human activity, but we’re seeing the trend slowly reversing itself. But people need to understand it to support it.”

In order to do this, McGuire dreams of building an interpretive center on his property that would teach visitors about the Cascade-Siskiyou ecosystem and why it’s so important to preserve. He’d also like to build an additional 30 or 40 cabins, some of which he could sell off to finance the project. But he can’t do that because Oregon’s landmark land-use law forbids it. Passed in 1973, the Oregon Land Conservation and Development Act protects so-called resource land — land zoned as forest or agriculture.

“This legislation is what makes Oregon worth living in,” concedes McGuire. “But on the other hand, if you want to run a business on resource land, you have to deal with a set of pretty strict rules.” An amendment added in 1984 (“Goal 8”) allowed large destination resorts — places like Sunriver and Running Y Ranch — on resource land. “Most of these are gated rural communities with golf courses and some visitor accommodations,” says McGuire. (See “Destination Resorts 2.0,” page 56) But oddly, that amendment still forbade small-scale resorts, projects like Green Springs Inn, with a relatively small environmental footprint.

Which is why McGuire, with the support of Rep. Peter Buckley (D-Ashland), is drafting an amendment that would tweak the law, allowing small destination resorts with educational facilities and low-impact recreational activities (hiking, birding, fishing, etc.) to open on resource land.

“Both of those things gave us a lot of heartburn,” says Greg Holmes, Southern Oregon planning advocate for 1,000 Friends of Oregon. It would’ve opened up some of the worst outcomes that have come about under the large-scale resort amendment, Goal 8. So for the time being, McGuire is putting the legislation on hold and instead trying to get approval for his project at the county level. But even if the Jackson County supervisors grant him a permit to build on resource land, that decision could be shot down by a community member.

“Any citizen with $500 can appeal that decision to the Land Use Board of Appeals,” says McGuire. “And I cannot afford to fight an appeal.” If that happens, McGuire says he would rewrite the amendment, hopefully gaining 1,000 Friends’ buy-in, and ask Buckley to back it in the 2016 legislative session.

McGuire’s vision to allow small eco-resorts on protected land is one of several early-stage efforts that suggest a movement is afoot to relax Oregon’s famously strict land-use laws. Tension has always existed between environmentalists and pro-business interests in the state, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the tourism sector. As written, the 1973 law forbids small destination resorts on resource land and makes it difficult (but not impossible) for working farms to host overnight guests.

But as more tourists visit the state to discover its untrammeled rural beauty — from horseback riding in wine country to agritourism in the Gorge — business owners like McGuire are eager to oblige. Farmers are opening farm stays that include breakfast, outfitters are taking cyclists and horseback riders on agritourism-themed excursions, and nonprofits are forging European-style networks of hiking trails that merge public land with private enterprise — all while having minimal impact on local environments. Oregon’s land use law 2.0 may be a boon not only for ecotourism operators but for the environment as well.

That’s what the visionaries behind “Gorge Towns to Trails” are hoping, anyway. Launched three years ago by the nonprofit Friends of the Columbia Gorge, Towns to Trails seeks to develop a 300-mile trail that wraps around the Gorge, linking small towns and communities with wineries, breweries and secluded natural areas. Project manager Renee Tkach says the idea is modeled on European hiking tours, which allow travelers to hike from winery to winery (or pub to pub), spending the night along the way — sometimes at a winery or farm — while an outfitter delivers your bags.

“This program would’ve been a crazy idea 28 years ago, because there wouldn’t have been any connections between the towns,” explains Tkach. But over the past 28 years, the U.S. Forest Service has snapped up more than 40,000 acres of land, protecting it from development but also making it easier to build trails between towns. Friends of the Columbia Gorge also has a land trust through which they’ve already purchased over 1,000 acres of land. (The Land Trust is actively working with area land owners who are interested in easements and may purchase more private land as it becomes available.)

Originally, Friends of the Columbia Gorge thought the trail would live only on public land. But Tkach says that Gorge-area businesses — especially wineries and other agritourism ventures —have been so supportive of the concept of a European-style trail network that traverses both public and private land that the Land Trust may not need to purchase all the remaining private land.

“There’s a winery in Mosier called Analemma, and the owner, Kris Fade, was saying, ‘I want a trail that goes right through my vineyard, just like in Tuscany — private land but with a permit,’” recounts Tkach.

Though the entire 300-mile loop is a few decades off, certain segments are near completion. The Hood River to The Dalles corridor is 78% completed, says Tkach, and the Washougal to Stevenson section is 80% completed. When it’s finished, the Hood River-Dalles trail will be a three-to- five day experience with hikes of 10 to 12 miles a day. Tkach guesses that the entire 300-mile loop could be a two-week hiking trip.

Gorge Towns to Trail already offers “Trails to Ales” day hikes that end at a brewery and “wiking” trips that send hikers off with a wine tasting. But this spring, as a preview of future longer trips, they began offering overnights under the category of “Play & Stay.” In April they ran a “Blooms & Brews” trip that took guests on a private tour of gallery Lorang Fine Art in Cascade Locks, followed by dinner and pints at Thunder Island Brewing, an overnight at the Best Western and a morning hike at Dry Creek Falls. A few Gorge wineries may soon add yurts for farm stays, but for now, Airbnb seems to be filling in the lodging gaps, especially in towns like Mosier that don’t have hotels.

Nowhere is the cross-pollination of low-impact recreation and agritourism more apparent than in the wine industry. Wine-related tourism has always contributed a lot to the state’s economy: $207.5 million in 2013. Though the Oregon Wine Board doesn’t track economic impact by types of wine tours, outfitters say interest in their cycling, horseback riding and “wiking” (hiking and wine tasting) trips has never been higher.

“One of the obstacles with horseback riding are the liability issues,” says Lindley. “The folks at WillaKenzie welcomed us and are very open minded and friendly to both tourism and local businesses.” Lindley says these trips are also a low-impact way for travelers to see the Siuslaw National Forest up close. “Although we’re in federally owned land a lot of the time, there are different privately-owned pieces that are clear-cut, so you get to see a little bit of everything,” she says.

Over in Bend, James Jaggard from Wanderlust Tours retrieves tourists at motels and drives them to vineyards, breweries and cideries, where they can either hike or canoe off to the next site. These tours are popular with both retirees and college students, he says. “They love that our guides can interpret the natural and cultural history here,” says Jaggard. “Sipping local wines and craft beers is the icing on the cake.”

Agritourism, it turns out, is a growing part of Oregon’s tourism economy — and not just at wineries. “Staying on a winery, hazelnut farm or hop farm is such a cool, unique, original Oregon experience,” says Harry Dalgaard, destination development specialist at Travel Oregon. Despite land-use restrictions and liability issues, Dalgaard has seen a surge in the number of farm and ranch stays over the last few years, and a “relative explosion” of tours to farms and ranches. Travel Oregon is so confident about the potential of agritourism that the agency convened a statewide working group last year to more comprehensively develop and promote agritourism.

Some counties are more lenient than others when it comes to allowing visitors on a working farm. Lucky for Scottie Jones, the owner of the perennially booked Leaping Lamb Farm Stay in Alsea (35 miles southwest of Corvallis), the Benton county planner she worked with in 2006 was open to the idea. She approved Jones’ application for a two-bedroom cottage even though her land was zoned exclusively for farm use (EFU). Jones had to notify her neighbors of this change, but they gave their blessing too.

Jones, who is a member of Travel Oregon’s agritourism working group, sees farm stays as an essential way of maintaining farmland. “You don’t lose farmland if you allow small farms to diversify into agritourism,” she says. Her story proves her point. New farmers in 2003, Jones and her husband, Greg, learned the hard way that lambs alone would not pay for the farm. After a few years, they were only grossing $5,000 annually.

“Our retirement was financing the farm,” Jones says, noting that you can’t graze more than 40 lambs on 20 acres of pasture. “The economies of scale just aren’t there for small farms.” Now, with just one on-farm cottage (it goes for $250 a night in summer), Jones is grossing $35,000-$40,000 a year. Sixty percent of her guests come from Portland, with the rest hailing mostly from Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles. In the summer, she gets lots of European visitors, who are more familiar with the concept of farm stays, she says. Jones was spending so much time referring would-be guests to other farm stays (because Leaping Lamb was all booked up) that she launched Farm Stays U.S., a promotional website for American farm stays. So far there are 800 listings, with 32 in Oregon.

The other hurdle agritourism-minded farmers face is liability insurance. Because of the inherent risks of being on a farm (think dangerous farming equipment, slippery mud and temperamental animals), only one company in the state has insured farmers until now, says Ivan Maluski, director of Friends of Family Farmers. But Senate Bill 341, which at press time had just passed unanimously in the Oregon Senate and was headed for the House, will hopefully change that by limiting a farmer’s liability when members of the public visit for U-pick, pumpkin patches or farm stays. “The hope is that the bill will lower the risk of farmers getting sued and create an opportunity — a regulatory environment where more companies will consider insuring farmers,” explains Maluski.

Once liability issues and land-use restrictions are tackled, Dalgaard predicts we’ll soon see a veritable explosion of agritourism across the state. In some cases, entrepreneurs are creating an agritourism infrastructure in rural areas that haven’t had any tourism at all until now. Last fall 33-year-old James Good opened Good Bike Co. in Prineville—50- miles northeast of Bend. Located at the crosshairs of the TransAmerica Bicycle Trail and The Oregon Outback, a 360-mile “bikepacking route,” the shop has done a brisk business catering to cyclists of all sorts. But when Good began connecting with local farmers and ranchers, he realized there was an untapped opportunity.

“I thought, ‘That’d be a perfect match, to integrate cycling with farm-to-table,’” says Good, who was inspired by a recent cycling trip he and his wife took in Scotland. This summer he’s offering day-long bike trips to a nearby lavender farm, a dairy farm, a biodynamic vegetable farm, a working cattle ranch and a family-run cheesemaking operation. He also runs custom tours to the Willamette Valley, schlepping guests’ gear so they can ride from winery to B&B unencumbered.

McGuire, from Green Springs Ranch near Ashland, is encouraged by all of these developments in rural areas. And he’s well aware that the very reason Oregon farms are still intact — and so appealing to visitors — is because sprawl is contained. “Farms are being subdivided in every single state of the union except for Oregon,” says McGuire. “That’s why I would defend Oregon to the death!” But McGuire dares to dream for a balance that’s so far been elusive. “I’m thinking if we can write a real bill — something that the environmentalists and the people concerned about the economy could agree on — that would be a hot ticket.”

On December 18, 2012, a massive windstorm blew through the Willamette Valley, causing severe roof damage to Kevin and Carla Chambers’ triple-wide mobile home just outside Newberg. “We had a waterfall in our house,” says Kevin, a vineyard manager who has worked in the Oregon wine industry for 35 years. “My wife and I looked at each other and said, ‘Obviously, we’ll have to do something about our living situation.’”

Back in 1989, the couple had bought a 32-acre property called Resonance, knowing that it was an exceptional site for growing pinot noir grapes. In the hands of local winemakers such as Peter Rosback at Sineann and Brian Marcy at Big Table Farm, Resonance fruit consistently made some of the best wines coming out of the valley, according to reviews in respected publications such as International Wine Cellar.

So it was with mixed emotions that Kevin and wife Carla decided to part with their property, selling it to the illustrious Burgundian winery Maison Louis Jadot. (The sale price was not disclosed, but insiders say it broke a record for per-acre price for a vineyard in Oregon.) Setting the international wine world atwitter, legendary Jadot winemaker Jacques Lardière came out of retirement to run the company’s Oregon outpost.

“It was hard to let go of Resonance,” Kevin says. But with the money they made from the sale, the Chambers were able to buy their first stick-built home—on a Christmas tree farm in the Eola-Amity Hills.

While modest in size—the property has 20 acres of planted vineyards—this Resonance sale is just one of a half dozen recent Willamette Valley real estate transactions that signals the region’s growing appeal on the international wine stage. This trend is being driven by a handful of factors: the drought in California, comparatively low land prices in the Willamette Valley and the aging of Oregon winemakers. But the central reason large, out-of-state players are investing in the Willamette Valley is consumer demand for Oregon pinot noir.

“There are not so many places outside Burgundy where pinot noir is known, and Oregon is one of them,” says Thibault Gagey, deputy general manager of Jadot, referring to the company’s decision to purchase its first vineyard outside of Burgundy in Yamhill-Carlton.

The Oregon wine industry has come a long way since 1965, when David and Diana Lett planted the first pinot noir cuttings in the Willamette Valley. The region achieved international acclaim in 1979 — when the Letts’ Eyrie pinot noir came in third place at a blind tasting of some of the world’s finest pinots in Paris. Burgundian wine producer Robert Drouhin was so impressed that he sent his daughter Véronique to Oregon to work the 1986 harvest with three Oregon winemakers. In 1987 Drouhin purchased 225 acres in the Dundee Hills, making Domaine Drouhin the first French firm to plant roots in the Willamette Valley.

Today there are around 600 wineries in Oregon. Three-fourths are still small by industry standards, producing fewer than 5,000 cases per year. A 2011 economic impact study valued the industry at $2.7 billion, but that figure is larger today, says Michelle Kaufmann at the Oregon Wine Board. “We’ve had record harvests since then, additional wineries popping up, and all this outside investment.”

By all accounts, the buying spree over the past two years is unprecedented. A year ago, Jackson Family Wines in Santa Rosa, California, bought 320 acres of vineyards in both the Eola-Amity Hills and the Yamhill-Carlton wine regions. In May 2013, Seattle’s Precept Wine, the largest privately owned wine company in the Northwest, bought the 30-acre Yamhela Vineyard. In April California-based Foley Family Wines acquired the Four Graces, which included 54 acres in the Dundee Hills and 40 acres in Yamhill-Carlton. Sommelier Larry Stone, former president of Evening Land Vineyards, just bought a vineyard in the Eola-Amity Hills and has planted 66 acres.

Jadot winemaker Jacques Lardièrein the Resonance vineyard

In all cases, neither side would disclose sale prices. But Peter Bouman, the broker at Oregon Vineyard Property, says the recent range for planted acres has been between $45,000 and $60,000 an acre.

Private equity firms such as San Francisco-based Bacchus Capital Management have also made strategic investments in the valley. Bacchus has made debt and equity investments in Wine by Joe, one of the largest producers in Oregon, and in May they bought Panther Creek winery outright.

Then there are the outsiders who have been working and living here so long they are practically insiders. Domaine Drouhin staked its claim here 27 years ago. Late last year, they purchased the 122-acre Roserock Vineyard in the Eola-Amity Hills. This past March, pioneering Oregon winery Elk Cove bought the Goodrich Road Vineyard in Yamhill-Carlton, which has 21 acres of vineyard.

Wine-industry brokers say this is just the beginning. “The French are coming. And they’re going to keep coming,” says Bouman, who conducted the Jadot sale.

How is this frenzied activity impacting Oregon’s hundreds of small-scale winemakers? A tight-knit group — everybody here seems to know everybody else, and gossip travels fast — most winemakers interviewed for this article share the attitude of “a rising tide raises all ships.”

However, some also expressed anxiety about skyrocketing grape and real estate prices. Many winemakers don’t actually own their own vineyards, so these “land grabs” are taking thousands of acres of grapes off the market, causing a dearth of grapes and record-high prices. The average price for Oregon pinot noir grapes in 2012 was $2,738 per ton, a 20.6% increase over 2011. And though that figure dipped slightly in 2013, the price of North Willamette Valley pinot noir grapes — the most highly prized — were $2,819 a ton. As a result, winemakers who don’t own their own vineyards are being priced out of top-quality grapes.

Oregonians have long been sensitive to encroachment from outsiders. Today’s influx of well-heeled vintners from California, France and elsewhere echoes the recent migration of professionals from cities like Brooklyn and L.A. to Portland. Will the vintners, like these urban escapees seeking a greener, more balanced lifestyle, drive up real estate prices — not to mention bottle prices — in the Willamette Valley?

A perfect storm of factors has led to this moment. First, a bunch of vineyard owners are reaching mature vintages themselves — and are ready to cash in. “They’re 60, pushing 70, and need to retire,” notes Bouman, who has four vineyards for sale, including the 70-acre Eola Springs Vineyard in the Eola-Amity Hills, listed at $2.5 million.

The historic drought in California is also much worse than winemakers anticipated. Every week headlines proclaim record-low rainfalls. As a result, vineyard managers are predicting extremely low yields.

Kevin and Carla Chambers soldResonance to Jadot in 2013

“There’s no question anymore that the water issues in California are driving people north,” says Bouman. “I got a call the other day from a guy who is growing 500 acres in Lodi [in California’s Sierra Foothills] and basically is considering selling everything lock, stock and barrel and moving up here because of the drought. I’m getting an increasing number of calls like that.”

Few California buyers will publicly admit that the drought is one of their reasons for coming to the Willamette Valley, where the average rainfall is 35 inches a year. Marcus Goodfellow, owner and winemaker at Matello Wines, thinks that’s intentional. “That’s the game changer that no one talks about,” says Goodfellow. “What happens when California can no longer be California?”

When people ask Hugh Reimers, chief operating officer of Jackson Family Wines, why the company bought land in Oregon, he jokes, “Well, we were worried about global warming.” But Reimers, who grew up in Australia, says that’s tongue in cheek. The wine behemoth — which owns vineyards in Chile, Australia, France and Italy — had been eyeing Oregon for a long time, he says. So when the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) decided to sell off its vineyard investments, putting more than 500 vineyard acres in Oregon on the market in 2013, Jackson Family Wines snapped two of them up.

In addition to buying Gran Moraine in Yamhill-Carlton and Zena Crown in west Salem, the company bought Soléna Estate, a 35-acre vineyard, and Maple Grove, a big tract of land near Monmouth, where the company is planting 100 acres of vineyard.

“There are few places in the world where you can grow world-class pinot noir,” Reimers says, explaining why the company purchased 1,380 land acres in Oregon. But it didn’t hurt that real estate here is far cheaper than in other fashionable wine-growing regions. “And I think Willamette Valley vineyard prices will continue to appreciate. “says Reimers. “So it was a good real estate investment for us, as well as investment in quality.” While prime vineyards in Napa can go for as high as $300,000 an acre, $50,000 an acre is more typical in the Willamette Valley.

According to Gagey, Jadot’s purchase of Resonance Vineyard had more to do with the valley’s high-quality pinot noir than low land prices. “We went there two times, we tried the wines, we liked the wines,” says Gagey of his visits to Resonance. They also loved the specific property, on an east-west ridge in Yamill-Carlton, because it was dryfarmed (not irrigated) and own-rooted. (That is, old vines, not grafted rootstock.) “Those two things, we are very interested in,” says Gagey. Though small in terms of acreage, this purchase represents a big shift for the 160-year-old winery, which until now has only had acreage in Burgundy. They expect to release 2,000 to 2,500 cases of their first Oregon vintage (from 2013) in 2016.

Many local winemakers are flattered by this newfound passion for Willamette Valley pinot — and think investments by well-financed outsiders are a good thing.

“I’ve gotta be honest: The vast majority of the last 40 years has been getting our pinot on the map,” says Goodfellow, who has been making wine in Oregon since 2002. “Seeing big players like Jackson Family Wines purchase here validates the Willamette Valley as a region.”

Goodfellow, who purchases all the fruit he uses to produce 4,000 cases of wine a year, was dismayed to learn that one of his regular fruit sources — Bishop Creek Cellars — was on the market. “I’ve been producing wine from that vineyard since 2005,” he says wistfully.

But the general sentiment amongst Oregon winemakers, he says, is that these recent acquisitions may turn out to be a great boon for the region. “What’s happening now is proof that we have a grown-up wine region. We’re not the little brother to Burgundy anymore.”

Thirty-five-year-old urban winemaker Thomas Monroe at Division Winemaking Company in Southeast Portland relies on other growers for all of his fruit too. Despite being pushed out of three vineyards — and being turned down by another — Monroe, too, is sanguine about the influx of out-of-state winemakers. “It causes some short-term supply chain issues,” he says. “But ultimately, it’s an accolade — these people believe in Oregon. They have a lot of money behind them. They wouldn’t do that if they didn’t know that they would be able to make a high-quality product from this state.”

Oregon winemaker Eugenia Keegan

One thing that’s engendered good will is that most of these newcomers have hired well-regarded Oregon winemakers. “Jackson Family Wines has employed Eugenia Keegan, who is extraordinarily well-loved in Oregon,” says Goodfellow. (Keegan, who is general manager at JFW, came from Four Graces in Dundee.) JFW also hired Tony Rynders; Precept hired Sarah Cabot. Some companies have even continued allowing local winemakers to buy grapes from their new properties — at least for the time being. Lynn Penner-Ash, for one, was able to negotiate a long-term deal with JFW that allows her to keep buying grapes from one particular 3.5-acre block of the Zena Crown Vineyard. “We have worked with this site since its first crop in 2007 and have consistently done well in the press with the wines we produce from there,” says Penner-Ash. “It would be difficult to see our block go.”

But underneath this upbeat acceptance of outsiders lies a barely articulated wariness. The Willamette Valley has always positioned itself as the anti-Napa. Even today, tasting fees — if they exist — are minimal. And though there are plenty of fancy LEED-certified tasting rooms, there are just as many unheated sheds or scrappy living rooms where wine lovers taste by appointment only. Most established winemakers also have a philosophical commitment to keeping bottle prices affordable.

This presents a conundrum. One of the repercussions of these recent land grabs is that grape prices are through the roof. “In my 35 years in this industry, I have never seen grape prices higher than they are now,” says Kevin Chambers. And grapes from acclaimed sites like Shea Vineyards go for as much as $4,500 a ton.

Though of course a boon for vineyard owners, these higher grape prices mean wineries that don’t own their own vineyards are having to scramble to find new grape sources, or pay a premium.

Monroe and his wife, Kate, have felt the pinch of these price increases. Though they haven’t been directly impacted by the recent vineyard sales (yet), they have been priced out of a few of their regular fruit sources. Just four years ago, when he made his first Oregon vintage, Monroe was paying in the mid-$2,000 range per ton for pinot noir grapes. This year he’s paying well over $3,000.

Despite rising grape prices, Ken Pahlow, winemaker at Walter Scott Wines in the Eola-Amity Hills, hews to a $45 per bottle threshold. “I always felt that if Russ Raney [former winemaker at Evesham Wood] — after 25 years in the business — if his most expensive wine was $44, how could I come in and charge more?” Pahlow says about Raney’s Cuvée J, which Pahlow considers to be one of the best wines in the valley.

“Nearly 40% of our production is Willamette Valley pinot noir or chardonnay that retails for $23,” he says. “Once you get over $40, $45, you’re not going to sell a lot of wine to the Portland market.”

The newcomers — Jackson Family Wines, Jadot and Precept — are undeterred. Jackson’s entry-level Oregon Pinot under the La Crema label, released in April, retails for $35, and the company’s Gran Moraine Yamhill-Carlton Pinot is $45. These higher price points are strategic. “We didn’t go up there to try to bring the market down,” says COO Reimers. “If anything, we went up there because we saw an opportunity to elevate the market and the industry by producing wines at much higher price points.”

Elevating the market is a lofty goal. Elevating land prices … not so much. Peter Rosback at Sineann Winery — who purchases 100% of his grapes — says he was hurt by Kevin Chambers’ sale of Resonance Vineyard. “Kevin — he’s a friend of mine — he needed the money, but that pinot noir was really special,” says Rosback. He’s also frustrated by “California carpetbaggers” who have snapped up prime vineyards in the Willamette Valley.

“It’s annoyed me and friends of mine mostly because we aren’t rich,” says Rosback. “Winemaking is not a highly profitable enterprise. Our margins are low, and we have competition from all over the world.”

The winemaking process at Trisaetum Winery,where Jadot makes its wine. From top tobottom: The fruit is sorted, then dumped intoa vat to ferment. During the fermentationprocess, juice is drained from the bottomof the vat and pumped back to the topin a process called "pumping over."

Yet overall, even Rosback thinks these investments by well-financed outsiders are a good thing. “It’s validation of what our pioneers figured out 40 years ago,” he says.

This is a good outlook to have, since the acquisitions by outside winemakers show no signs of slowing down. In September California music executive Jay Boberg, chairman of digital music provider INgrooves, and Jean-Nicolas Méo of Domaine Meo-Camuzet in Burgundy bought the 13-acre Bishop Creek Cellars vineyard in Yamhill-Carlton. Bouman says a few additional high-profile French winemakers are poking around, and he’s also shown properties to Californian, Italian and even Brazilian buyers. Mike McLain at McLain & Associates Vineyard Properties in Albany confirms the interest from California and abroad, saying his phone is ringing off the hook. “We’re getting a lot of calls from all over!” he says.

And yet the question remains: Can the Willamette Valley make room for these deep-pocketed newcomers while maintaining its unpretentious, laid-back vibe? Or does their arrival signal a shift in the landscape — like the entrance of a shiny new Starbucks that drives up rents and latte prices in its wake?Gone are the days when a winemaker of modest means could buy land in the Willamette Valley without significant outside investments.

“The water is much deeper than it was 12 years ago when I started,” says Goodfellow. “Your margin for error is less. You have to elevate your game.”But if you can’t afford a vineyard — or land on which to plant one — then you’re stuck paying $3,500 a ton for pinot noir grapes … at least for a few years. People are planting like crazy right now, according to Goodfellow and others, so prices should come down in three years, when those vineyards start bearing fruit.

Which brings us back to per-bottle prices. The fastest-growing segment of the wine industry is the upper end of the wine market — those that sell for $20 a bottle or more. Plenty of Oregon winemakers already charge $50 or more per bottle. But with grape prices higher than ever — and Jackson Family Wines and other newcomers charging more per bottle — the idealistic Oregon winemakers who want to keep pinots affordable may have to rethink their strategy.

Maybe, just maybe, all these changes in the valley — not to mention the continued drought in California propelling winemakers to move north — will give Oregon winemakers permission to charge a little more for their wine. That would be a boon for Oregon winemakers, if not exactly for consumers.

As for Kevin Chambers: He had planned to farm hazelnuts on his new property in west Salem but can’t shake the grape-growing bug. “This property is crying out to be a vineyard,” he says of his new southeast-facing property, which spans the crown of the Eola-Amity Hills. Once Chambers rips out 62,000 more Christmas trees, he’ll plant grafted rootstock. He intends to sell his grapes to local winemakers. “It’s all cyclical. Prices are very high right now. We’ll see quite a bit of planting over the next five years, and then prices will come down again.”

16 July 2014

Demand for organic food continues to soar: Last year, sales of organic food rose to $32.3 billion — up 10% from 2012. Here in Oregon, organic produce wholesaler Organically Grown Co. has been championing organic growing methods for four decades. Founded as a cooperative in Eugene 36 years ago, OGC started with less than a dozen organic farms. “And some of those were big gardens!” recalls David Lively, one of the founders.

Though it became a for-profit company in 1983, OGC (like another local organic success story, Bob’s Red Mill) is also an ESOP, meaning its employees and member farmers are owner/shareholders. Today, the company has annual sales of over $125 million and employs around 250 people who work at the company’s Eugene, Portland, or Kent, Washington offices — or at its 120,000-square-foot distribution center in Gresham.

I sat down with Lively, who is now the company’s Vice President of sales and marketing, to ask him about the company’s growth, why it distributes New Zealand apples and South American bananas and the reason the Northwest is such an organic stronghold.

OB: You’re an organic produce wholesaler—the company transports organic produce from farms to grocery stores, juice bars, and food buying clubs. But while you’re Northwest-based, you don’t only distribute regional produce. Can you explain?

DL: Even back in the ‘80s, we knew we had to source some produce from outside the Northwest. Some of the growers just wanted to move their stuff, but another group of us were like, “That leaves us with a serious predicament because we’re in Oregon and so we can only grow crops half the year. We’ll have nothing to do from November through April. What’s going to pay the rent?"

So we’re working with growers that are located all the way from British Columbia through the western United States to Mexico, South America, Hawaii, and even New Zealand. We have a full product line, pulling from all over the joint.

OB: You’re an S-Corp and an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan). What’s the difference between a farmer-owner and a farmer who merely has their produce distributed by you?

DL: Owners’ shares are worth value and so their shares increase as the company grows. We’ve got growers who, when they joined and put down $15,000 in the ‘80s, are worth tens of millions of dollars now. Owners vote for the board of directors and they may serve on the board of directors. At some point, they can retire and the business will buy their shares.

OB: How many growers do you work with, total?

DL: It’s hard to say because some of those growers are disguised behind brokers. We work with an outfit called Awe Sum Organics, which works with apple growers in New Zealand. We only bill Awe Sum, but they represent a lot of growers. Same with our banana deal: we only work with Organics Unlimited, but Mayra [Velazquez de Leon] represents growers who work in Southern Mexico. But I’d say about 240.

06 June 2014

In case you hadn’t noticed, our food cart scene here in Portland is booming. Heralded as the most vibrant street food culture in the country, if not the world, it’s been breathlessly written about in glossy food magazines fromSaveur to serious newspapers like the Guardian. (Sample line: “Portland's food carts have fed millions, launched careers and contributed to urban regeneration.”)

According to Brett Burmeister, managing editor and co-owner of Food Carts Portland, there are currently about 525 year-round food carts in town, more if you count catering trucks and trucks that only come out in summer: to street fairs, the farmers’ market and such.

With a friend about to open her own food cart, I started to wonder, what does it take to launch and run one of these mobile food businesses?

First, obviously, you have to find a cart. Sometimes the cart comes with with the spot its parked on; sometimes you buy (or rent) it separately.

McKinze Cook and Sean Fredericks were Peace Corps volunteers in the Republic of Georgia for two years, and fell in love with the country and its cuisine. When they moved to Portland in 2012 with the idea of opening a Georgian food cart, they checked out all of the main pods to assess their vibes before deciding on the Alder Street pod.

McKinze Cook and Sean Fredericks at Kargi GoGo, the popular Georgian food cart

“We knew we wanted to be downtown because it’s such a high traffic area for food carts,” says Cook. “We saw that a cart was for sale, and so we moved on it.” They had to make major improvements to the cart, which had variously turned out pizza, Argentinian fare, and Thai food. In addition to a commercial dough sheeter, which they use to make their khinkali (dumplings) and Georgian flatbread, they upgraded to a commercial fridge and added a flat-top grill and a few burners. They opened their business in March of 2013, calling it Kargi Gogo (good girl).

When Rick Gencarelli opened Lardo in 2010, he ordered a custom-made cart because he wanted to stand out out from the fray. “It was like a little cottage,” recalls Gencarelli, sounding wistful. “The detail on it was so great.” The cart, which was outfitted with a 24-inch flat-top stove, two burners, a counter-top fryer, and a three-basin sink, cost him $25,000. Having a unique-looking cart paid off, though. Whenever Portland food carts got any press, Lardo was always the one that got the photo.

The $25,000 Lardo food cart in all its glory

The cart, which has changed hands a few times since Gencarelli opened his bricks and mortar Lardos, is now owned by Fried Egg I’m in Love on MLK. Gencarelli, who drives by it all the time, says he calls it “Fried Egg I’m in Lardo.”

30 April 2014

When the historic Lostine Tavern closed in January 2013, residents of the Wallowa Valley in Eastern Oregon lost a central meeting place.

The tavern, located in a 1902 gothic building, had been a cornerstone of this rural farming community since the 1940s. It was the kind of place where locals would meet for a beer or come for a hearty breakfast before heading out to the ranch for a day’s work.

“They did taco nights and socials,” says local writer and chef Lynne Curry. ““It was beloved.” But it hadn’t been a viable business for awhile.

The gothic façade of the Lostine Tavern, in Eastern Oregon

Curry, former chair of Wallowa’s Slow Food chapter and the author of Pure Beef (a guide to cooking grass-fed beef), had wanted to open a farm-to-table restaurant ever since she moved to Wallowa in 2001. But there were obstacles. Wallowa County produces enormous amounts of beef and wheat, but most of it leaves the state, feeding the commodity food system instead of local residents.

“I went to a cattleman’s meeting the other night and met a rancher who said he could get enough beef to feed 40,000 people a year!” says Curry. According to the last Agriculture Census, only 2.16% of the livestock and crops produced in Wallowa County are direct sales. The rest — 97.84% — is sold outside the county, typically to the commodity market.

Curry and fellow Slow Food board member Peter Ferré had been hatching a plan to serve local food in Wallowa when the Lostine Tavern went on the market. Ferré snapped up the tavern (which narrowly escaped an explosive fire this February) and Curry became his business partner. (In January, Lisa Armstrong-Roepke joined on as a third business partner.)

Curry has an impressive pedigree: she’s cooked at both Seattle’s Herbfarm and at the Willows Inn on Lummi Island. But the revamped Lostine Tavern, which is slated to open mid-May, will not be upscale. Curry envisions an old-timey menu with pot pies, sourdough biscuits, pepper steak, and fruit cobbler. “I want to hearken back to the most deluxe mining camp you can imagine,” says Curry, who will run the kitchen. “The funny part is that making pickles, canning, sourdough—all the things that are so popular now—they’ve never gone out of style here. We’ll do all the things people have done for generations.” She also plans to revive taco nights and pie socials.

Until recently, Lostine (population 213) was a food desert, with the closest full-service grocery store — a Safeway in Enterprise — ten miles away. But that’s starting to change. Last summer, internationally-known furniture designer Tyler Hays (a Wallowa native) moved back and bought M. Crow Mercantile, keeping the 100-year-old general store stocked with fresh local produce, eggs, and meat. June Colony, who aggregates produce grown in the lower valley and sells it via June’s Local Market in Lostine, recently got a $68,000 grant from the USDA to invest in infrastructure like cold storage units and a refrigerated truck that will help her increase Wallowa residents' access to high-quality produce.

The revamped Lostine Tavern, though it won’t have a grocery section, will also expand residents’ access to local, quality food with a deli that will have sandwiches, meats and cheeses by the pound (including a housemade pastrami), and all kinds of prepared seasonal salads — from green to potato.

Keeping prices affordable for this farming community, where 28% of residents qualify for food stamps, is crucial to the Lostine Tavern’s success, says Curry. She and her business partners will achieve this by raising as much money up-front as possible via ChangeFunder, a new crowd-funding site that focuses exclusively on Northwest businesses that have a mission of growing healthy communities. ChangeFunder is a project of Springboard Innovation, a Portland-based nonprofit dedicated to helping people launch sustainable ventures. The Lostine Tavern was the first project to go live on the site.

“Lynne and Peter have the same kind of values that we do,” says Amy Pearl, founder and CEO of Springboard Innovation. “They want to build a value chain for local markets that doesn’t exist right now.” Wallowa farmers and ranchers like Beth Gibans at Backyard Gardens and Liza Jane McAlister and Adele Nash at 6 Ranch have already expressed interest in supplying Lostine Tavern, and Curry is talking to a local woman who is raising pastured chickens.

The economic impact of keeping money in the local foodshed could be huge. Research from the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture in Ames, Iowa shows that $1 spent on local food can have a "multiplier effect" of as much as $2.60. In other words, for every dollar a Wallowa County farmer makes, $2.60 is generated in the wider local economy (because he or she is paying employees and buying goods and services at local businesses like M. Crow Mercantile). “That same $1 spent at a national grocery chain leaves the county quickly because that chain—for the most part—doesn’t buy local goods and services and profits go wherever the corporate headquarters are located,” explains Portland-based food systems consultant Matthew Buck.

Another happy result of the Lostine Tavern sourcing locally-produced food? Not only will Wallowa-area farmers and ranchers be able to charge higher prices selling locally than they would by selling to the commodity market, they’ll be able to keep a larger share of that end price.

10 April 2014

It may be obvious, but most farmers don’t make a lot of money. According to preliminary data from the 2012 Agriculture Census, 52% of America’s 2.1 million principal farm-operators don’t call farming their primary occupation. Presumably, that’s because they need off-farm income and/or health care benefits to survive.

Curious to know a little bit more about how farmers make a living in Oregon—particularly on small and medium-sized farms—I called up a farmer I’d bumped into recently at the Farmer-Chef Connection conference, Josh Volk. Volk, who worked at Sauvie Island Organics for seven years before launching his own organic vegetable farm, Slow Hand Farm, is now farming at Our Table Cooperative in Sherwood.

Farmer Josh Volk at Our Table Cooperative

(photo by Shawn Linehan)

When he was at Sauvie Island Organics, Volk averaged 40 hours a week and received a monthly salary. But Volk wanted to spend less time farming and more time sharing his wisdom about farming. When he left to start Slow Hand Farm, he kept it small enough—.15 acres—so that he could get all his production, harvesting, planting, cultivating, and deliveries done in two days—and devote the remaining three to teaching, consulting, and writing.

As sole proprietor of Slow Hand Farm, Volk was able to turn a profit and pay himself a salary, though a meager one. “It varied from season to season. I think my worst year was something like $7.50 an hour. My best year was $10 an hour,” says Volk, who posted the figures on his blog. Fortunately, Volk—like over half of American farmers—had “off-farm” income coming in to supplement his farming income.

One of his consulting projects was helping former Microsoft program manager Narendra Varma and his wife Machelle develop Our Table Cooperative Farm, a multi-stakeholder cooperative in Sherwood. When Varma asked Volk to join his team of vegetable farmers, Volk initially hesitated because Our Table was so far from his St. John’s home. But many elements of the project appealed to Volk, so he ultimately agreed to fold Slow Hand Farm’s CSA into Our Table.

Now Volk—who works at Our Table three days a week— makes more than he did at his own farm, and he no longer has to market or distribute his vegetables—other staffers perform these jobs. (One of the benefits of Our Table’s model is a shared infrastructure including marketing, selling, and distribution—not to mention farm equipment, tools, and land. The farmer is freed up to do what he or she does best: farm.) That said, Volk, an avid biker, is committed to dropping off Our Table CSA shares via his cargo bike at Wieden+Kennedy, a yoga studio in Northeast, and his own front porch in St. John’s.

A veggie share from Our Table Cooperative Farm

During a year-long trial period, Volk and five other farmers have been working as regular employees, but now they’re faced with a decision: will they financially invest in the co-op and be partial owners? Or leave? If Volk decides to be a partial owner, he, along with other farmer-owners, will not only be eligible for profit-sharing, he’ll be able to make decisions about what to grow and what to do with the profit. For example, if farmer-owners choose to, they could vote to provide themselves with health insurance.

At first glance, the cooperative model seems to offer farmers a more stable income. Rather than being reliant on the weather, or how much you sell at the farmers’ market each week, you get an agreed-upon salary. (Though Volk works part-time, the other five farmers at Our Table are full time. An additional two part-time farmers were hired last week.) But as Volk points out, a worker-owned co-op isn’t all that different than any other business, it’s just that a group makes decisions instead of a CEO. “If you don’t make the budget, like in any budget, you either have to decide to shut something down or take out debt,” notes Volk.

But there are other benefits to working in a cooperative farm. Shari Sirkin at Dancing Roots Farms and her husband Bryan Dickerson are sole proprietors of a 10-acre farm in Troutdale that has a popular CSA and supplies some of Portland’s top restaurants including Ned Ludd, Genoa, and Navarre. But even after farming full-time since 1997 (with one year off to fix up the old farmhouse on the Troutdale property) Sirkin still doesn’t make enough money to take an annual vacation. (And only recently were she and Bryan able to leave the farm with a trusted employee so they could take a weekend getaway.)

Though she pays her workers good hourly wages (anywhere from $9.10-$11) she hasn’t been able to offer health insurance and is convinced that she and Bryan only make ends meet because they live a frugal farmer’s lifestyle. “I don’t really know how we do it,” Sirkin says, a note of wonderment in her voice. “We rarely eat out—though we love it and we want to support the restaurants that love us. I’m not into clothes or jewelry, we never take vacations, our cars are old and used, we don’t have cell phones. Hell, we don’t even have a T.V.!”

Volk acknowledges that one of the main benefits of the cooperative model is that it allows him—and other Our Table farmers—to take time off. Because the Varmas have capital, Volk has also been able to scale up quicker than he could’ve done on his own. The Varmas bought farming equipment and the land—which came with a blueberry farm—and are building a farm stand on site as well as a commercial kitchen, where a new prepared foods manager (yet to be hired) will create value-added products like stews, soups, pies, and jam. It’s too soon to know if the investments that Varma and others are making will pay off, but many are curious to see if this innovative model will bear fruit.

Meanwhile, risk-averse farmers with a social bent may want to work at an “agrihood,” a planned community built around a working farm. According to a recent New York Times article, agrihoods are the next big thing in residential developments, from Fort Collins, Colorado to Northlake, Texas. Riffing on the term CSAs (community-supported agriculture), farmer and consultant Daron “Farmer D” Joffe calls them “DSAs” or “development supported agriculture.” Joffe, who has consulted on several DSAs including Serenbe in Chattahoochee, Georgia, says that farmer managers at these developments can make anywhere from $30,000-$100,000 a year, and they and their families often get tax-free housing, to boot.

Joffe, who ran his own CSA for years and calls the workload-to-pay ratio “brutal,” says that farmers’ low and often unpredictable salaries are the biggest challenge in the industry.

“I’m not saying DSAs are THE solution,” says Joffe. “There’s still this huge question of how to make a living as a farmer. But there’s no doubt that these developments can create more stable job opportunities for beginning farmers. They provide capital, land, and equipment, up front—these are some of the biggest obstacles for new farmers.”

07 March 2014

When Chuck Eggert founded Pacific Foods in 1987, the health food movement was still an off shoot of the ‘70s hippie culture. Today — with organic food one of the fastest growing segments of the grocery industry — Eggert’s Tualatin-based natural foods company is on an upward trajectory. Pacific is one of the largest food companies in the state, and Eggert says the privately-held company has seen double digit growth every year. The company distributes 300 million pounds of organic broths, soups, and chowders annually. And that’s only part of the company’s expanding product line. Pacific also makes “soup starters,” non-dairy beverages like almond and hazelnut milk and even refried beans and mac & cheese.

We spoke to Eggert about why his company has flown under the radar in Oregon, how saving a family-run chicken hatchery has helped his bottom line and why he thinks organic food is anything but elitist.

OB: How has the natural foods industry changed since you founded Pacific Foods?

Eggert: There’s a Natural Products Expo every spring. Back when we started there were maybe 2,000 people there; this year, they have 65,000. It’s gone from where you knew virtually everyone there, to filling the entire Anaheim Convention Center. Peoples’ eating habits are changing so quickly—which is great!

OB: Is there great demand for your products all over the country? And is Oregon a big market?

Eggert: We’ll ship anywhere from 250-300 million pounds of soup and broth per year, nationally. About 12 million cases of products leave the state. Oregon is a very small market for us, actually—only 3-4% of our sales are in state. California is a huge market—and so is the Northeast. We’ll ship about 5 million cases to the East Coast.

We’ve flown under the radar here in Oregon. I don’t think people realize how much product we’re doing on an ongoing basis.

OB: What are your most popular items?

Eggert: Chicken broth and roasted red pepper soup.

OB: I know that sourcing ingredients locally is important to you. But with such robust demand for your products—especially the three categories of chicken broth and chicken noodle soup—how do you manage to find enough Oregon-raised chickens?

Eggert: We grow a significant amount of the chickens ourselves. We also deal with a poultry supplier in Dayton. At any given time we have about 100,000 chickens around, year-round, on our own farms and other farms combined.

We process about 10,000 birds a week at our meat processing plant in Dayton: Dayton Natural Meats. We’re the only USDA poultry plant in the state. We do pork, beef, turkey, chicken, and duck. We bring in meat, and process it into broth at our Tualatin facility and do the packaging.

23 January 2014

This is my second post as food & ag blogger at Oregon Business Magazine.

Recently, I joined a friend for appetizers at Ava Gene’s, Stumptown Coffee founder Duane Sorenson’s celebrated new Italian restaurant on Division Street. One of Bon Appetit’s ten best new restaurants of 2013, Ava Gene’s was also Portland Monthly’s pick for top restaurant of 2013. (“With Ava Gene’s,” food critic Karen Brooks said, “Portland grows up. But rock and roll never dies.”) So I shouldn’t have been surprised to find it packed on a Sunday at 5 p.m.

But packed it was.

A few weeks later, I went to an industry wine tasting at Cathy Whim’s Pearl District boîte Oven & Shaker on a Thursday evening. It was fairly early — around 6PM — but the room was already buzzing with families, couples, and boisterous groups sharing wood-fired pizzas, insalata Nostrana, and bottles of chianti. After that, my husband and I went for dinner at Veritable Quandary, a Portland institution that’s been around since 1971. There wasn’t an empty table in the spot.

What’s going on here? Don’t get me wrong: I’m thrilled that Portland’s restaurants are thriving — and that a new place seems to open every week. About 500 restaurants and brewpubs opened in Oregon last year, the majority in Portland, according to OLCC records. As everybody knows, we have an incredibly vibrant culinary scene—with outstanding chef talent and unsurpassed locally sourced ingredients.

It just makes me wonder—who are these people who can afford to dine out several nights a week? They can’t all work for Adidas, Intel, or Nike — or some new tech start-up or innovation consultancy firm. Could it be, as Le Pigeon chef Gabe Rucker suggested recently in this San Francisco Chronicle interview, that dining has become our chosen form of entertainment? “People used to go out to dinner and a movie,” Rucker was quoted as saying. “Now, it’s like going out to dinner is the movie.”

The movement to label genetically modified foods suffered a major blow last month with the defeat of ballot measure 522 in Washington state, which would have required manufacturers to label foods containing GM ingredients.

So what does 522‘s defeat mean for the GM-labeling efforts in Oregon? Ivan Maluski at Friends of Family Farmers, a pro-labeling nonprofit that works on policy issues to protect socially responsible farming in Oregon, says his group will urge Oregon legislators to introduce a labeling law during the February session. “We believe the economic impact would be minimal and that the transparency would benefit consumers,” Maluski told me in an e-mail.

Scott Bates, director of GMO-Free Oregon and chief petitioner for a GM labeling initiative (that, if approved, will be on the ballot in 2014), says his group is also pushing the legislature to introduce a bill in February.

In Washington, many agricultural organizations opposed I-522—including the Washington State Farm Bureau and the Washington Association of Wheat Growers. Whether or not that means Oregon farmers and food processors will be in favor of a GM labeling law remains to be seen.

According to Oregon Department of Agriculture spokesman Bruce Pokarney, Oregon doesn’t grow a lot of GM crops — just sugar beet seed, alfalfa, some field corn, and a smattering of GM canola in eastern Oregon. Presumably that means that most Oregon farmers wouldn’t be impacted by a GM labeling law.

Eleven years ago, when GM labeling initiative Measure 27 tanked here in Oregon, an industry alliance called Oregonians for Food & Shelter opposed the measure. Their members include agriculture groups such as the Oregon Wheat Growers League and and the Oregon Farm Bureau as well as biotech companies including Syngenta, Monsanto, and DuPont.

Blake Rowe, CEO of the Oregon Wheat Growers League, says it’s hard to react to a potential Oregon initiative until he’s read the language but admits that the League — which advocates on behalf of thousands of Oregon wheat growers — would generally oppose a labeling initiative. “It’s just really hard to do something at the state level,” Rose says. “Especially when so much of commerce is at the national level.”

But Maluski says that for Oregon farmers — even conventional (i.e. non-organic) farmers — there’s actually an economic incentive for a labeling law. For example, Oregon farmers who grow non-organic wheat for export to Asia — nearly a $500 million market — already need to ensure that their wheat, though conventionally grown, is uncontaminated by GM crops. Otherwise, they risk losing their biggest market, as they temporarily did last summer after the GM wheat scare in eastern Oregon.

Will a labeling law increase costs for food manufacturers? Craig Ostbo, a managing partner at Portland-based marketing communications firm Koopman-Ostbo has worked on packaging changes for a range of Oregon companies including Kettle Chips, Bob’s Red Mill, Lochmead Farms, and Coconut Bliss. He says he’d be hard pressed to find an economic onus to adding “contains GM soy or corn” to an ingredient deck. “Companies change their packaging all the time,” Ostbo says — without increasing the price of their products. (See the “all natural” and “gluten-free” claims that have proliferated in recent years, not to mention Halloween-themed packaging for candy makers.) Food costs would likely go up if manufacturers chose to reformulate their products so as to avoid GM ingredients, as Michael Lipsky explains in this excellent Grist article.

Judging by what happened a decade ago with Measure 27, it’s not the Oregon farmers and food companies pro-labeling advocates need to worry about. Most of the $5 million spent on the “No” campaign for Measure 27 came from out-of-state corporations including Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, and Dow. Only a measly $5,500 came from Oregon businesses.

This time around, food-savvy Oregonians are more aware of GM foods, and a handful of deep-pocketed out-of-state donors like Whole Foods, Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap, the Organic Consumers Union, and Nature’s Path will likely help the pro-labeling side get its message out effectively. Crucially, Oregon’s 2014 general election is when Governor Kitzhaber is up for re-election, which will likely elicit a higher voter turn-out than Washington state had this fall, which was an off-year election.

“A decade is a long time,” says Maluski, referring to the failure of Measure 27. “Now, there’s a greater sense of people wanting to know how their food is being produced, whether with pesticide inputs or GM or other chemicals. Consumers want to make informed decisions.”

23 October 2013

Cultivating Profit. Oyster farming is a tricky business — you can’t wantonly meet demand or you won’t have any oysters left to sell. And you’re reliant on the health of the oceans, which have been acidifying in recent years, making it hard for oyster larvae to mature. Yet Oregon Oyster Farms co-owner Xin Liu is striking a balance between conservation and profit. Over the past 16 years, he has grown revenue from $700,000 annually to $1.6 million. The company had just nine employees when Liu and two partners bought it from Newport Pacific in 1997. Today his staff numbers 25, including shuckers, packers, drivers, field crew and retail workers.

Clamoring for more. Liu, who sold a few million oysters last year, all from his 500-acre site on Yaquina Bay, is in the enviable position of having more domestic demand than he can supply, even as demand surges from Asia. In addition to supplying Oregon restaurants, he has a standing order from New York City’s Grand Central Oyster Bar for Kumamoto and Pacific oysters. About 10-15% of his oyster harvest is flown to Taiwan and China. Yet Liu has had to turn down eager buyers from Hong Kong and San Francisco, who have been awaiting his oysters for years. “Hong Kong keeps bugging me,” Liu says. “But I don’t have enough to sell to Hong Kong.”

Consider the Oyster Bed. Last fall Liu and Mark Wiegardt from Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery purchased Pearl Point Oyster Company, which included a 72-acre oyster bed in Netarts Bay. “Netarts Bay is one of the cleanest bays on the West Coast,” says Liu. “It produces very good briny oysters.” There they plan to grow smaller-size Kumamoto and Pacific oysters; larger ones will be harvested in Yaquina Bay. Liu calls these 7- to 10-inch oysters, which can take as long as seven years to grow and command top dollar in China, “oyster steaks.” Though he won’t know for another 18 months what the growth rate and density is like in Netarts Bay, Liu hopes to have enough oysters to start selling to San Francisco restaurants — and perhaps a few lucky Hong Kong buyers — by next summer.

Conservation beckons. In addition to the Pacific and the Kumamoto, Liu grows the recently reintroduced Olympias — “Olys” — which are native to the West Coast. Prized for their diminutive size and tangy flavor, Olys were overharvested and nearly wiped out a century ago. Recently Liu started working with the Wetlands Conservancy, the Nature Conservancy and local Siletz tribes to ramp up restoration efforts in Yaquina Bay. “It’s really hard to get this population back,” says Liu, noting it takes Olys two and a half to three years to grow to the size of a half-dollar coin. Despite their cult-like popularity, Liu only sells Olys in limited quantities — five to 10 dozen a week. A model of restraint, Xin Liu aims to show that running a profitable shellfish farm is not mutually exclusive with managing the ocean’s resources responsibly.

09 October 2012

In the current issue of Oregon Business Magazine, I write about Duncan Berry, the CEO of Fish People, a new Oregon-based seafood company that's just launched four ready-to-eat entrees at Portland's New Seasons grocery store (it's also at Whole Foods throughout the Pacific Northwest). These fish dishes—salmon in chardonnay with a dill cream sauce, Thai coconut lemongrass tuna, coconut yellow curry tuna, and smoked salmon and oyster chowder—come in foil “retort” pouches and take only three minutes to cook. (You poach them in boiling water and serve over your favorite carbohydrate.) The seafood for all four of these dishes is caught off the Oregon coast and is processed by medium-sized Oregon processors. All are caught via hook-and-line, trawls, or pot—all methods that result in minimal bycatch and that have no effect on habitat.

What I find compelling about Berry—and what I hope readers will find compelling, too—is his commitment to preserving ecosystems (in this case, the Oregon Coast and the Columbia River). He's also determined to help revive Oregon's economy by buying from local fishermen, using local processors, and contracting with local saucemakers (family-run Heritage Specialty Foods here in Portland). In addition to sourcing only sustainably-harvested local seafood for Fish People’s product line, he’s published an Oregon-centric seafood rating card (see here) that gives much more nuanced information on Oregon seafood species than either the Marine Stewardship Council or Monterey Bay Aquarium, the two best-known third-party sustainable seafood ratings out there. The Fish People Seafood Ratings provides info on how the fish is caught, of course, but it also details health information (Oregon albacore, for instance, has minimal mercury content due to age and size of fish). The Fish People ratings are the only ones to measure worker health and safety as part of their scoring system. For more on Berry's background (as CEO of an organic textile company in Seattle) and on his business plan, read on.